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Comment by superasn | Hacker News Reader

I used to donate my idle cpu to seti@home back in the day. Wonder if the same can be done for creating an open search engine to compete with Google.

Also since the resources are crowd sourced it can make it easy to get around rate limits and anti scraping too.

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Perhaps not weirdly I had the same thought yesterday [1]. https://yacy.net was suggested in response.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29417925

You can do this with Yacy right now, https://yacy.net but it's not great for results generally.

I have often wondered if something built on activity pub or like that would be an option allowing people to group servers with peers they like or trust. Its something I want to implement actually and may get around to doing one of these days.

Well for starters, one could implement the API to return ActivityStreams formatted responses. That would be a good start to being compatible with the fediverse and stuff while not going insane in implementing a full and proper ActivityPub service. Been there, done that, way better tool for "lower level" features.

[0] https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-core/

That roughly what I thought. I’m not familiar with activitypub at all. I will probably investigate this deeper.

You see to have some knowledge in this area. Do you have any suggestions of places to look to achieve something like this?

I know the usual thing against crypto, but I wonder whether a gridcoin model would work. https://gridcoin.us/

I don't think it would be that easy. You need to distribute the indexing data. But you could federate search servers and have them send queries to others.

That's a really cool idea!

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