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Alexandria Search

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Re: Alexandria Search

#161

Post by bricemo »

blondin wrote: post #157
bricemo wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. When people say they Google is returning poor results, I can never get an answer of what specific URL people actually want. Just general unhappiness and some mythical, vague, ideal result.

google search often returns wrong, unrelated, or no result. i have been in that situation many times before and moved on to change my query. i am (and most of us are) trying to solve my own issue. not google's. that's why you get vague answers to your questions. it's not because it doesn't happen. it's because at that moment we care much more about solving our problem. that's what brought us to google search in the f…

thanks for engaging, I'm trying to understand. can you give a specific example of a search query, and the ideal URL you think you should get as a result (that google is missing)? what is one queryresult example of a gap these independent engines are filling?

Re: Alexandria Search

#162

Post by Shorel »

devmunchies wrote: post #20

The initial commit was 11 months ago and written in C++. I haven’t done C++ since college ~7 years ago. Is it a good language for greenfield projects these days, or would something like Go or Rust (or Crystal, Nim, Zig) be better for maintainability and acquiring contributors?

I would prefer D, but I ended up using C++ for one of my projects because it has all the libraries, and these smaller languages only have bindings for some of them.

So my answer is: if you can do all you need in the base language, something more modern like D-lang is preferred, but if you need some particular library, you either have to add all the bindings yourself, or use C++.

Re: Alexandria Search

#163

Post by linspace »

josefcullhed wrote: post #87

Hello, My name is Josef Cullhed. I am the programmer of alexandria.org and one of two founders. We want to build an open source and non profit search engine and right now we are developing in our spare time and are funding the servers ourselves. We are indexing commoncrawl and the search engine is in a really early stage. We would be super happy to find more developers who want to help us.

Awesome work.

1. How do you plan to finance?

2. How will you avoid SEO?

3. What kind of help would be most welcome?

Re: Alexandria Search

#164

Post by josefcullhed »

schemescape wrote: post #160
josefcullhed wrote: post #87

Hello, My name is Josef Cullhed. I am the programmer of alexandria.org and one of two founders. We want to build an open source and non profit search engine and right now we are developing in our spare time and are funding the servers ourselves. We are indexing commoncrawl and the search engine is in a really early stage. We would be super happy to find more developers who want to help us.

Very impressive work so far! Apologies if I missed it (and solely out of curiosity), but how roughly much does hosting Alexandria Search cost (per month)? (I'm assuming you've optimized for cost to avoid spending your own money!) I have some other questions (around crawlers, parsing, and dependencies), but I need to read the other comments first (to see if my questions have already been answered).

Thanks!

The active index is running on 4 servers and we have one server for hosting the frontend and the api (the API is what is used by the frontend, ex: https://api.alexandria.org/?q=hacker%20news)

Then we have one fileserver storing raw data to be indexed. The cost for those 6 servers are around 520 USD per month.

Re: Alexandria Search

#165

Post by IvanHall »

Seirdy wrote: post #152
josefcullhed wrote: post #87

Hello, My name is Josef Cullhed. I am the programmer of alexandria.org and one of two founders. We want to build an open source and non profit search engine and right now we are developing in our spare time and are funding the servers ourselves. We are indexing commoncrawl and the search engine is in a really early stage. We would be super happy to find more developers who want to help us.

Oh boy, I have too many questions. I'd appreciate any answers you're able/willing to give: 1. Do you have any plans to support the parsing of any additional metadata (e.g. semantic HTML, microformats, schema.org structured data, open graph, dublin core, etc)? 2. How do you plan to address duplicate content? Engines like Google and Bing filter out pages containing the same content, which is welcome due to the amount o…

Hello, Ivan here (the other founder).

1. Yes, any structured data could definitely help improve the results, I personally like the Wikidata dataset. It's just a matter of time and resources :)

2. The first step will probably be to handle this in our "post processing". We query several servers when doing a search and often get many more results than we need and in this step we could quite easily remove identical results.

3. The ranking is currently heavily based on links (same as Google) so we will have similar issues. But hopefully we will find some ways to better determine what sites are actually trustworthy, perhaps with more manually verified sites if enough people would want to contribute.

4. I think that Gigablast and Marginalia Search are really cool and interesting to see how much can be done with a very small team.

Re: Alexandria Search

#166

Post by IvanHall »

linspace wrote: post #163
josefcullhed wrote: post #87

Hello, My name is Josef Cullhed. I am the programmer of alexandria.org and one of two founders. We want to build an open source and non profit search engine and right now we are developing in our spare time and are funding the servers ourselves. We are indexing commoncrawl and the search engine is in a really early stage. We would be super happy to find more developers who want to help us.

Awesome work. 1. How do you plan to finance? 2. How will you avoid SEO? 3. What kind of help would be most welcome?

Hello, Ivan here (the other founder).

1. We would prefer to be funded with donations like Wikipedia.

2. I don't think we can avoid it completely, perhaps with volunteers helping us determine the trustworthiness of websites. Do you have any suggestions?

3. I think programmers and people with experience raising money for nonprofits could help the most right now. But if you see some other way you would want to contribute, please let us know!

Re: Alexandria Search

#167

Post by IvanHall »

bghfm wrote: post #31

How can we help improve the project? Usage, feedback?

Hello Ivan here (one of the founders)

At the moment we primarily need help with development and funding. But if you have suggestions or want to help in some other ways, please let us know!

Re: Alexandria Search

#168

Post by projektfu »

danuker wrote: post #140
blewboarwastake wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pro tip: Alt+E takes you directly to the search bar, then you can press Tab for selecting the search engine. The best part is that you never use the mouse this way. You can also use ddg bangs, they contain every search-engine/site by pressing Alt-D if you remember the bang for the site.

Alt+E takes me to the Edit menu.

Ctrl-E

Re: Alexandria Search

#169

Post by linspace »

IvanHall wrote: post #166
linspace wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Awesome work. 1. How do you plan to finance? 2. How will you avoid SEO? 3. What kind of help would be most welcome?

Hello, Ivan here (the other founder). 1. We would prefer to be funded with donations like Wikipedia. 2. I don't think we can avoid it completely, perhaps with volunteers helping us determine the trustworthiness of websites. Do you have any suggestions? 3. I think programmers and people with experience raising money for nonprofits could help the most right now. But if you see some other way you would want to contribut…

Regarding the raise of money I wouldn't be surprised if given the current state of things in the EU you could manage to get some funding. I have no experience on it but there are companies specialized on helping with writing grant proposals.
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