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by hawski 3147 days ago
I started to work on something like it. With intention of filtering-out ad-serving websites first (thanks to EasyList filtering rules) and heavy-JS second. I'm glad that someone already did something like this.

Is there some more information about it? I found that it is done by https://www.wireservice.ca Is there a technical info?

I was wondering how big the index is. Because it may be just possible to serve the multi-gigabyte index with torrent. Then the update mechanism would serve only deltas. It could be then used locally. However index would probably have to be without content - so no snippets. I don't know if it would be useful that way.

It could use a comparison site. Side by side with Google for the same search. I would certainly want to use it this way for a while.

I think this is the way for the alternative search engine to somewhat succeed. Because I think it's almost impossible to compete with Google at being Google. Look at how Bing manages.

2 comments

I agree! I'd never thought of using tor, but I had very similar ideas about an engine that doesn't index a site if it has ads, etc. I had an idea of using a delayed response in order to lessen the hardware requirements. So a user submits a query, then checks back later for a response. A little bit like a traditional library, haha! Anyway, i'm really glad to hear others are doing similar stuff, I think there is a market. The info is out there, it's just lost in a sea of noise.
You might be interested in Ted Unangst's miniwebproxy:

https://www.tedunangst.com/flak/post/miniwebproxy