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Mwmbl: Free, open-source and non-profit search engine

mwmbl.org

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Re: Mwmbl: Free, open-source and non-profit search engine

#62

A lot of the terms I searched for returned no hits. The Firefox add-on crawls pages linked from Hacker News which is amusing perhaps but seems unlikely to crawl a representative selection of the web. Perhaps the user should be able to suggest pages to be crawled. But when it does find something it is very quick! So I'll give it a go.

Same experience: it’s quick at finding irrelevant links. For some reason, it seems to have indexed a lot of spammy websites: search for "Trastevere" on Google, and you get Wikipedia and pages about the district in Rome. Search it on Mwmbl and you only get links from a random *.it-romehotels.com website.

Other random examples: search for "2023" and the very first link is "2023 Pomeroy College Basketball Ratings". Search for "iphone", and the 5th link is a page about iPhone 6s that was last updated in 2021. Typos don't work: "haker news" has only one result, a hungarian press article.

Re: Mwmbl: Free, open-source and non-profit search engine

#63
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is not how a large part of the citizens on the internet works. Hell, a not insignificant number of people will still "search" for Google in their address bar before they get to the actual googling

Except I'm not talking to a large part of the citizens, but to a single one. Do you type 'google.com' in your address bar to search?

You're being argumentative for no good reason. He was suggesting a name change to improve the likelihood of a large userbase, not a change for his own convenience.

Re: Mwmbl: Free, open-source and non-profit search engine

#64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arguably, Google was probably a odd name for a search engine to people in the 90s that weren't maths-savvy.

But it's a normal word, unlike "mwmbl" (I had to look it up, couldn't remember where the "b" and "w" goes after some seconds).

It's a normal word now. In 1998, it was pretty weird. How many o:s does it have, is it -el or -le? etc.

Re: Mwmbl: Free, open-source and non-profit search engine

#65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arguably, Google was probably a odd name for a search engine to people in the 90s that weren't maths-savvy.

But it's a normal word, unlike "mwmbl" (I had to look it up, couldn't remember where the "b" and "w" goes after some seconds).

No it's not, it is an intentional misspelling of "googol" and means nothing - not in English or any other language. "Spotify" is also not a "normal word" in any language. And for those not native in English (there's supposedly only some 400 million of those), it's just a random sound sequence like any other.

mwmbl is a shortening of the welsh writing of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mumbles. Only tricky part is knowing that the w is pronounced as a u. Maybe it would be slightly easier if one followed the fad of leaving out vowels, but guessing a vowel and having a tricky vowel does not seem much different.

Re: Mwmbl: Free, open-source and non-profit search engine

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it's a normal word, unlike "mwmbl" (I had to look it up, couldn't remember where the "b" and "w" goes after some seconds).

No it's not, it is an intentional misspelling of "googol" and means nothing - not in English or any other language. "Spotify" is also not a "normal word" in any language. And for those not native in English (there's supposedly only some 400 million of those), it's just a random sound sequence like any other. mwmbl is a shortening of the welsh writing of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mumbles . Only tricky part is know…

> Only tricky part is knowing that the w is pronounced as a u

Is that really tricky? W is basically pronounced like U in English already[1]. It just looks funny when you exchange the two.

[1] e.g. say this sentence "uorld uar tuo uas the uorst"

Re: Mwmbl: Free, open-source and non-profit search engine

#69

If I understand, having only 4096 bytes of data per term causes multiple terms in the same query to intersect to little or no results. The purpose seems to cut cost in compromise of completeness.

Yeah. That seems like a design decision that will scale poorly. For reference, even in my dinky 100M index I have individual terms with several gigabytes of associated document references.

In general hash map table index designs don't tend to be very efficient. If you use a skip list or something similar, you can calculate the intersection between sets in sublinear time.

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