• Dragon@lemmy.ml
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    4 years ago

    Has it been tried? it might require re-thinking how search engines work. If the databases were all formatted consistently, it seems possible.

    • tuna@lemmy.ml
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      4 years ago

      There’s Yacy. It worked ok when I was running it locally, but the moment I connected it to the rest of the network my search results were dominated by porn and spam sites.

      • Dragon@lemmy.ml
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        4 years ago

        Search engines are incredibly conplex. the problem might not be decentralization, but just proper investment and development.

        • fidibus@lemmy.161.social
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          4 years ago

          I agree. I think it’s sad that YaCy never worked as well as the alternatives, but it is a very cool project nonetheless!

          Maybe in the future someone will try the concept again and succeed.

          Also: Google is getting worse and worse, so it’ll get easier over time ;)

        • tuna@lemmy.ml
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          4 years ago

          the problem as I understand it is that with yacy you request relevant results from peers in addition to your own local DB. but that makes it really easy for spammers to keyword-stuff results and push their sites to the top.

          I’m not sure how we can trust random people to give you search results without being overrun by spam.

    • someone@lemmy.ml
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      4 years ago

      Yes, there is YaCy. And it sucks. It brings like 10 results in single word searches, usually none of which are relevant. When you write a sentence of sorts it just freezes.