“I found it very weird that there essentially is no way to browse the web in an open manner. So that’s what I am trying to build,” the founder of Stract said.
What are the actual reasonable outcomes here:
- The search engine becomes successful and requires monetization to pay for the hosting/indexing costs
- The search engine does not become successful and the ever increasing cost of indexing the entire internet forces monetization or shut down
- You self host your own version, in which case you need to start indexing yourself (see problem #2)
I think what would be interesting is to get everyone who self hosts this do part of the indexing. As in, find some way to split the indexing over self-hosted instances running this search engine. Then make sure “the internet” is divided somewhat reasonably. Kind of what crypto does, but instead producing the indexes instead of nothing.
Interesting. The creator included the !bang feature. Nice. Gonna have to play with this more.
yup, every engine that supports !bangs gets my attention immediately.
I should probably know what this does but I’m thinking I don’t. Could somebody explain?
They’re ways to search on a specific site from the engine’s search bar. For instance,
!gsch cowswill search for cows on google scholar from DuckDuckGo. I don’t know how stamdardized bangs are across engines, but they’re super useful if you use a bunch of obscure search tools on the day to day.
Ok, hold on…
Can it be self-hosted?
Looks like it from the readme!
Amazing, will try this out on the Pi then.
In the github page linked in this post:
We recommend everyone to use the hosted version at stract.com, but you can also follow the steps outlined in CONTRIBUTING.md to setup the engine locally.
there is a business around it and the project doesn’t really have any background so no trust that has built up. I would thread carefully
