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?
I recall there is a federated search engine… somewhere. Anyone know what that was called.
Are you thinking of YaCy?
Ah, I wondered if something like that had been tried before. Looks like it is maybe still running: https://yacy.net/
The demo isn’t giving me useful search results.