883
Google won’t comment on a potentially massive leak of its search algorithm documentation
(www.theverge.com)
this post was submitted on 28 May 2024
883 points (99.8% liked)
Technology
59605 readers
3397 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Can't wait for selfhosted web search to become better.
You mean hosting your own crawler/indexer? That doesn't really sound like a thing you could do cost-effectively.
Surprisingly, it's very doable, requires basic technical knowledge and relatively minimal computing resources (runs in the background on your computer).
https://yacy.net/ Github
I have tampermonkey script that sends yacy to crawl any websites that I visit, and it's keeping up relatively good index for personal use of the visited websites. Combine yacy with ~300gb of Kiwix databases, add searxng as a frontend and you have pretty strong self hosted search engine.
Of course you need to supplement your searches from other search engines, as yacy does not crawl the whole web, just what you tell it to.
I encourage anyone who's even slightly interested on this stuff to try Yacy, it's ancient piece of software, but it still works very well and is not an abandoned project yet!
--
I personally use Yacy mostly on private mode, but it does have the distributed network there as well.
Yeah, I guess the P2P component sort of solves part of the issue I was imagining by distributing indexes and crawling. I was thinking that people were trying to run all of Google on a raspberry pi at home.
This is interesting, have you had it index reddit? I'm just wondering how much storage space the database takes up.
Hi!
Great question! I don't crawl reddit, but this applies to other large sites as well. reddit themselves they have at this very moment banned the ip range where I host my Yacy at (Hetzner). I just looked up from my index that I do have 257k pages indexed from reddit through teddit I used to run, this is from before reddit api-enshittification, going to delete those right now.
And the way how the crawling is done is you define crawling depth, which limits how much content is crawled from the site.
... etc.
I have my tampermonkey scripts set to only crawling depth of 1 at the moment (Just set them to 2 actually, kinda curious how much more I will be crawling), I've manually crawled some local news sites as a curiosity at the beginning. And my database is currently relatively small, only around ~86.38 gigabytes according to Yacy. This stores aproximately 2.6 million documents in Yacy's Solr.
--
Yacy has tons of options for crawling, so you can customize how much it crawls and even filter out overly large sites with maximum number of documents set when you send Yacy there.
Large picture of Yacy's interface for starting a crawl.
--
The tampermonkey script I've been talking about in these posts, it's very simple script: https://github.com/JeremyRand/YaCyIndexerGreasemonkey
Hit me up if you guys have more questions! I'm by no means an expert on Yacy, but I will do my best to answer.