GitHub - searxng/searxng: SearXNG is a free internet metasearch engine which aggregates results from various search services and databases. Users are neither tracked nor profiled.
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SearXNG is a free internet metasearch engine which aggregates results from various search services and databases. Users are neither tracked nor profiled. - searxng/searxng

All the posts about Reddit blocking everyone except Google and Brave got me thinking: What if SearNGX was federated? I.E. when data is retrieved via a providers API, that data is then federated to all other instances.

It would spread the API load out amongst instances, removing the API bottlenecks that come from search providers.

It would allow for more anonymous search, since users could cycle between instances and get the same results.

Geographic bias would be a thing of the past.

Other than ActivityPub overhead and storage, which could be reduced by federating text-only content, I fail to see any downside.

Thoughts?

  • hendrik@palaver.p3x.de
    3·
    3 months ago

    That is misinformation. It doesn’t need anywhere close to that amount of RAM. It’s pretty much like other webapps and I used to run it on an old computer. It’ll fill up your harddisk, though. If you allow it to do that.

    • seang96@spgrn.comEnglish
      1·
      3 months ago

      Well initial setup was definitely interesting. I didn’t want to expose 8090 and wanted it behind a web proxy and I finally got that working and actually received my first remote crawl overnight. I had to change to 80/443 internally so it would map correctly for p2p connections, public port setting doesn’t apparently cut it. I kinda dislike the whole setup with it micromanaging CPU load, but otherwise it doesn’t seem atrocious for a new peer at least, I guess this and the web proxy problems are likely awkward due to the age of the software.

    • seang96@spgrn.comEnglish
      1·
      3 months ago

      There also seems to be a lot of settings so perhaps they had it misconfigured. It also is Java so I wouldn’t put it past it for such a monolith of a Java program to require so much to be performant. Perhaps I’ll try a cluster of them then and see how it fares.