Serious question, why do we give so much power to these tech firms such as Google, when really the solution is decentralization. We have some solutions for money with bitcoin, but there still doesn’t seem to be a viable alternative with a search engine that is decentralized?

  • Nevar@lemmy.ml
    5·
    4 years ago

    What do you mean by decentralized? Searx actually works better than Google with it’s meta search capabilities and the fact you can host it anywhere, it is decentralized.

    Are you referring to some sort of decentralized indexing of the internet?

        • leanleft@lemmy.ml
          6·
          4 years ago

          pros:

          • powerful customization. intuitive and fine grained.
          • decentralized. huge power but not perfected.
          • crawler is simple and customizable. fairly raw.
          • solr/lucene benefits included from day 1.
          • website that covers the basics. and forum for help.

          cons:

          • frequently buggy and feels heavy
          • documentation. very little documentation. many good features that are difficult to discover or use.
          • consumes alot of storage. not dividable.
          • setup takes time
          • no foolproof simplicity. and less adoption due to setup time+difficulty.
          • not recognized as important and not very popular. which is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
          • not too many maintainers/contributors. slow development.

          alternatives:
          none
          there are many alternatives for more efficient small personalized search engines with medium startup time and skill level.
          a crawler can be more customizable if you script it yourself. (for yacy or whatever else)

          • Danrobi@lemmy.ml
            2·
            4 years ago

            To run YaCy less demonic (low resources device)

            Controlling cpu usage :

            At the /PerformanceQueues_p.html page, you can limit some threads (light processes inside the JVM) maximum numbers (in the Thread Pool Settings table). When you are crawling, you can also control the Speed / PPM (Pages Per Minute) in the /Crawler_p.html page.

        • xe8@lemmy.ml
          3·
          4 years ago

          https://arborist.wip2p.eth.link/#!/goyacy

          I’m new to YaCy and not aware of what may or may not be working but I just saw this mentioned as a “frontend for searching YaCy without having to remember which node to use”.

          Anyway, I’m gonna give it a try.

          What’s not working? Is it a matter of needing more crawlers as @Danrobi@lemmy.ml mentioned, or something else?

          • Bilb!@lemmy.ml
            1·
            4 years ago

            Wow, 2/3 times I tried searching through this site I got a dead (or otherwise inaccessible) node.

            • xe8@lemmy.ml
              1·
              4 years ago

              Yeah, basically the same for me. Sometimes it works ok. Sometimes I get infinite loading.