In a similar spirit, there used to be an app called SMSmart that can proxy your phone's internet connection through a vpn tunnel over... SMS! So if you don't have any internet connection but has unlimited sms plan, you could still access the internet, slowly. I bet your webapp would pair very well with this.
this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2023
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Cool project! I'm always on the lookout for more search services. It works without Javascript, which is great! It's very clean and focused.
The Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) for Google are embarrassingly large. Here's a comparison from Kagi: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-speed.html
It's a little surprising that Duckduckgo's SERPs are even bigger...
I know of a few others that fit this use case, if anyone's interested.
Kagi's interface works entirely without Javascript and is a meta-search engine with results from Google, Bing, and its own indexes, and I think it has some of the best results (paid search though).
Mojeek is another search engine which uses its own index and is accessible without Javascript.
Another cool, fast search engine with its own index (though smaller) is Marginalia: https://search.marginalia.nu/
This one is free software, and you can view the sources here: https://git.marginalia.nu/marginalia/marginalia.nu
And there's also Searx, which is a fairly lightweight (but nowhere near as much as Blaze is) metasearch engine released as free software: https://github.com/searxng/searxng
Thanks for sharing :)
Such a cool project :D
Very cool!
Thank you!
Hey, that's pretty cool! Bookmarked, thanks for sharing your work.
Thank you!
Very interesting! Thank you for sharing your project!!
However, in terms of some of the benefits you mention in the "motivations", bandwidth, energy efficiency and CO2 might weak points: after all your server (backend) stays on 24/7 and it does all the heavy lifting anyway, doesn't it? So you are not really saving bandwidth/energy/CO2... (unless - of course - you cache in "time" and "space" and reuse the search results for queries of yours and of other users).
Yes, I didn't research this extensively... it was more of a hunch. :D Yes, certainly, I simply thought that if you minimize phone usage, it would result in a longer battery life and fewer charging cycles, which in turn would reduce CO2 emissions... but I admit it's a bit of a stretch. :D
It's pretty complicated. Something like half the emissions / footprint of a phone or computer is in the manufacture of it so anything that means people don't need to replace their device is a win, regardless of battery life or power usage.
A lot of servers are run off renewable energy. If you check out the sustainability pages of AWS or Azure they both talk a pretty good game. Plus if you're using some flavor of serverless there isn't really a dedicated CPU core just for your app so sometimes the server side of it would be using zero energy as it's gone to sleep.
We really need to get to grips with how to measure the 'ecological weight' of software in a simple, reliable and transparent way.
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