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Comment by softwaredoug | Hacker News Reader

I wish there was a way to differentiate a “search engine” as in one that crawls the web and a “search engine” like Elastic or Solr.

Maybe the latter should be a search server?

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I think the correct terms would be "web search engine" or "web search" and "search engine" or "full-text search engine". Wikipedia says "web search engine". But I agree, the ubiquity of Google as the "search engine" makes it a bit muddy to acknowledge that a search engine is any program or system that is used to search data. It's an interesting information retrieval concept that can be applied to many things.

I think it's a lot easier to maintain clarity when we identify this as what it actually is: yet another low effort front end for the Bing search engine's API, which aims to attract and monetize privacy-conscious consumers with a big lie.

I like the term "search database", since it's a database that has some APIs and logic purpose-built for general search engines built on top of it. Elasticsearch, for example, is frequently used as a document-oriented data store rather than a search engine, like in the case of Kibana or APM.

wouldn't a crawler be a "web crawler"? It doesn't actually handle the search engine aspects.

Web search vs application search?

search engine vs full-text search engine?

Google would count as a full text search engine then.

Web search engines generally are also full text search engines.

This project is useless for people who have their own private text to search.

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