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This Guy Has Built an Open Source Search Engine as an Alternative to Google in His Spare Time (www.404media.co)

submitted 9 months ago by noodlejetski@lemm.ee to c/foss

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"I found it very weird that there essentially is no way to browse the web in an open manner. So that's what I am trying to build," the founder of Stract said.

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[–] ptz@dubvee.org 19 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

I found the GitHub for it: https://github.com/StractOrg/stract/tree/main

What I still can't figure out (in my very shallow dive into the repo) is if it's a meta search engine like Searx-ng or if it does its own crawling and builds its own search index.

I run Searx-ng and love it, but I'd be interested in a true self-hosted search (though I'd need to devote a lot of resources to build and run such an index).

Anyone know?

Update: Looks like it crawls and maintains its own index. From the credits/thanks at the bottom of the readme (emphases mine):

The commoncrawl organization for crawling the web and making the dataset readily available. Even though we have our own crawler now, commoncrawl has been a huge help in the early stages of development.

[–] 2xsaiko@discuss.tchncs.de 9 points 9 months ago

From the readme, it uses its own index:

Fully independent search index.

Also here's a related discussion: https://github.com/StractOrg/stract/discussions/136

[–] debanqued 2 points 9 months ago

#YaCy is an open source crawler that you can run and feed Searx with. I recall some searx instances that run their own YaCy. YaCy can also share indexes with other YaCy instances.