This Guy Has Built an Open Source Search Engine as an Alternative to Google in His Spare Time
This Guy Has Built an Open Source Search Engine as an Alternative to Google in His Spare Time
"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.
"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.
So have many others, except they didn't start a company based on it. As soon as it is part of a company, it is no longer free and open
The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources. The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale.
Paradoxically (or not), restrictions on selling software is a fundamental violation of freedom. When the OSS movement says free, it means freedom as in free to do what you want, not free as in free beer. Of course, that freedom also includes the freedom to give it away.
So in practice, that usually results in exactly what you lament: free software with a business model on top to support its development and pay programmers so they can eat.
Why? It depends on the business model, even RMS says it's ok to make money with open source
What are the actual reasonable outcomes here:
- The search engine becomes successful and requires monetization to pay for the hosting/indexing costs
- The search engine does not become successful and the ever increasing cost of indexing the entire internet forces monetization or shut down
- You self host your own version, in which case you need to start indexing yourself (see problem #2)
I think what would be interesting is to get everyone who self hosts this do part of the indexing. As in, find some way to split the indexing over self-hosted instances running this search engine. Then make sure "the internet" is divided somewhat reasonably. Kind of what crypto does, but instead producing the indexes instead of nothing.
I wonder how it compares with searxng. I do like that it's written in Rust instead of Python.
It's got a fully independent search index according to the README. SearxNG, LibreX, LibreY, etc. just takes results from multiple search engines and combines them.
there is a business around it and the project doesn't really have any background so no trust that has built up. I would thread carefully
Ok, hold on...
Can it be self-hosted?
In the github page linked in this post:
We recommend everyone to use the hosted version at stract.com, but you can also follow the steps outlined in CONTRIBUTING.md to setup the engine locally.