PeARS - the People's Search Engine
"PeARS is a free search engine that you can run locally from your browser, or from your own server. It allows you to ‘index’ pages (i.e. to produce a computer-readable representation of the pages’ content, essential to the search process), and to search pages that you or your friends have indexed. In a local setting, search happens entirely on your machine, meaning that no one knows what you are searching and when. In a decentralised setting, you and your friends can get together to maintain an search engine that you have entire control over. We are slowly building a PeARS network made of carefully curated instances. Rediscover the Web as it was meant to be!"
You can see the PeARS instances here: https://onpears.org/orchard/get-a-pod?pod=Tips
2 replies
Interesting - I hadn't come across this yet. I'll need to look into it when I get some time. More experimentation around collaborative/federated indexes, that don't devolve into spam and poor quality webpages, can only be a good thing.
I wonder how it compares to YaCy? I deployed an instance of that recently, and while it's been good for local search (I've been using it like Hister - only to index pages that I've visited and found useful), I find the remote search to be wanting. It seems to perform better when you curate the pages it indexes, so I imagine that having category-specific instances like PeARS would help in that respect. It'd be nice to have the quality of the index come from the people maintaining it and setting the standards for what is included.
this is actually super cool. can i have a private instance that also federates whatever i crawl?