[HN Gopher] Infinity: open-source search engine
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Infinity: open-source search engine
Author : freediver
Score : 179 points
Date : 2020-08-07 10:38 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (infinitysearch.co)
(TXT) w3m dump (infinitysearch.co)
| fsflover wrote:
| See also: peer to peer free search engine https://yacy.net
| numpad0 wrote:
| > When you search for something on our site, we take the results
| from other search engines and our own indexes,
| qihqi wrote:
| Currently its just Bing:
| https://gitlab.com/infinitysearch/infinity-search/-/blob/mas...
| harryf wrote:
| Since Yahoo! got out of the game, Bing is the only major
| search engine in the English speaking world providing an API
| for developers against their index.
|
| Yandex _might_ be another option (haven't looked) or even
| Baidu. Of course there are unofficial ways to scrape Google
| but you can't build a legit business on that.
|
| Side note: a far simpler first step than trying to break up
| Google would be requiring them to have a search API and
| contractual obligations that enable others to do business on
| top of it.
| searchableguy wrote:
| Here are the results: https://ibb.co/album/Mfc6br
|
| Obviously one data point but I searched few more things that I
| didn't include. Google is better for the same query.
|
| Now that I think about it, google's best strength is their
| crawler and cache infrastructure. I never find latest and up-to
| date content with the same speed on other search engines.
|
| They don't seem to modify results from bing.
| lisper wrote:
| Yes, AFAICT this is just DDG with a less silly name.
| searchableguy wrote:
| I like duckduckgo's name though. It's playful. They also
| own duck.com
|
| _Hey, duck this query_
| ffpip wrote:
| PS: Google was the company that sold duck.com to DDG.
|
| DDG also owns ddg.gg
| rmetzler wrote:
| I find it really disturbing that you can't link to result pages.
| I think this is some kind of REST principles violation.
| adsjhdashkj wrote:
| Neat, their ads are powered by: https://www.ethicalads.io/
|
| This makes me wonder - what ads would be acceptable in the eyes
| of privacy focused developers? Any?
|
| And i don't mean UX - i mean, what ads would you, a privacy
| focused developer, recommend i install on my site. Assuming i
| want to fully respect by users privacy, while still attempting to
| pay for the server costs.
|
| Maybe this warrants a AskHN, but it seems relevant here as
| they're implementing this exact concept. Thoughts?
| ziddoap wrote:
| >what ads would be acceptable in the eyes of privacy focused
| developers
|
| I think it's a pretty straight-forward and easy answer.
|
| Don't put ads that breach user privacy. Just use context-based
| advertisements.
|
| If your ads are asking about my canvas size, mouse position,
| etc. or otherwise are attempting to track me from website to
| website, I'm not cool with that and will block it whatever way
| possible. Other dark patterns (blending in to website e.g.
| Reddit's sponsored posts) are also terrible, but not
| necessarily related to your question re: privacy.
|
| If I know a website is using context-based advertisements with
| no tracking, I allow the ads and sometimes even follow them if
| I need whatever is being advertised.
| cxr wrote:
| OP seems to be asking for specific examples of ad services to
| use.
|
| (I'm not sure what's up with the number of responses to the
| question, "what ads would you [...] recommend i install on my
| site [a]ssuming i want to fully respect [m]y users privacy",
| with answers such as, "Don't put ads that breach user
| privacy".)
| ziddoap wrote:
| Obviously the question is ambiguous enough that there is
| more than one interpretation.
|
| Even if they said "What specific & exact ad service would
| you recommend", a reply of "Any ad service that doesn't do
| tracking -- consider contextual based ads" is still a valid
| one, no?
| cxr wrote:
| No.
|
| > Even if they said [...]
|
| We don't have to imagine anything. We can look at what
| was written (and I quoted it again above). No matter what
| a person has in mind when writing out, "Don't put ads
| that breach user privacy", it's not a meaningful reply to
| the question that was actually asked.
| ziddoap wrote:
| Interesting...
|
| You started with "OP seems [...]", which sort of implies
| you are interpreting as well...
|
| Whatever, I'll stand corrected I guess. My (and everyone
| else except you!) reply is not meaningful.
|
| Edit to add: If I ask for a product that does X and
| respects Y, and someone says "Here are the criteria I use
| to make sure any product respects your Y requirement", I
| would accept that as a valid and helpful reply. Maybe
| it's just me.
| cxr wrote:
| > You started with "OP seems [...]", which sort of
| implies you are interpreting as well...
|
| I edited that in to soften the message. It's like the
| approach of phrasing things to avoid use of "you" when
| addressing a topic, to prevent people from getting
| defensive--which I also do a lot and did here. Clearly
| that effort was wasted.
| eternalban wrote:
| We can also ask the alternative question which is never asked:
|
| - what other mechanisms can server the same utility as
| advertising for businesses?
|
| - what other mechanisms can support viable business models.
|
| What is strange about advertising is that it enjoys a bizzare
| outsized role in determining social norms that is never
| questioned. Sure, businesses need to advertise their services
| and goods but at the cost of even destroying privacy? I find it
| strange.
| erikrothoff wrote:
| One aspect to consider is that it is the tried and true
| solution. Surely many businesses and a lot of smart people
| have considered alternatives. It seems, save from actually
| paying money or living off the generosity of others, ads won.
| utf_8x wrote:
| Personally, I think ethicalads.io and contextcue.com are just
| fine. Maybe even carbonads.net but good luck getting them to
| even talk to you without a very large audience already in
| place.
| ximeng wrote:
| Ads that can be turned off. If they're not adding enough value
| to users for them to turn them on, get rid of them.
| komali2 wrote:
| Cory Doctorow just did a whole email on this. In short:
| contextual ads. Here's the email:
| https://mail.flarn.com/pipermail/plura-list/2020-August/0001...
| skyfaller wrote:
| Same content in a more web-friendly format:
| https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/05/behavioral-v-
| contextual/#...
| chris_f wrote:
| I've spent a lot of time over the last few months looking at
| different privacy focused forms of monetization, specifically
| aimed at search engines because of my use case. [0]
|
| The main factor determining your options is whether you are
| comfortable having a 3rd party ad provider have access to the
| IP, user agent (and potentially search term in some cases) of
| your users.
|
| If that is not a dealbreaker for your use case then there are a
| lot of different options, including EthicalAds which I believe
| is a great service.
|
| Understandably, the main reasons for this are because the ad
| networks need to prevent fraud, and the ad sponsors usually
| want some kind of measurable metric to determine ROI.
|
| If you are not comfortable with the above compromise then your
| options for contextual advertising are significantly limited
| with the only real option being to sell direct ads to
| companies.
|
| [0] https://coil.com/p/runnaroo/Privacy-and-Search-Engine-
| Moneti...
| olah_1 wrote:
| How does Coil not have _all_ of your data, though? They
| maintain centralized knowledge of everything you look at and
| for how long. Or am I missing something?
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| >with the only real option being to sell direct ads to
| companies.
|
| Maybe I don't understand the complexity behind the ad-network
| curtain today, but direct ad sales worked fine pre-internet.
| Serve the ads from the same domain as your content and you
| can prevent ad blocking. Sounds like a win-win to me.
| NotSammyHagar wrote:
| Almost all companies won't bother with buying ads directly
| from a random small company, because they don't know if you
| are trustworthy or won't show up some controversial content
| that hurts their brand. Much easier to use an ad bundler
| (from their standpoint) like google.
| chris_f wrote:
| _> Sounds like a win-win to me._
|
| Yeah, I agree. The challenging is finding the relevant
| companies who wish to advertise and the ad 'sales' process.
| It's significantly more work than just plugging in an
| existing ad network who has a ready supply of ads, and it
| requires a slightly different skillset that's not
| necessarily a core competency. I'm going through the
| process right now of reaching out to relevant companies
| with an aligned privacy focused and it is a mixed bag of
| results.
|
| Having said that, I think it is worth it in the long term
| because it makes you less reliant on other companies, but
| it is a tremendous amount of work upfront.
| 1propionyl wrote:
| In case anyone from EthicalAds is reading this, you've got a
| copy error:
|
| > We believe good advertising should _compliment_ content and
| never get in the way. That's why we built a network that
| complies with AcceptableAds, BetterAds, and DoNotTrack.
|
| Complement, not compliment.
| nicoburns wrote:
| > This makes me wonder - what ads would be acceptable in the
| eyes of privacy focused developers? Any?
|
| Ads that:
|
| - don't track you.
|
| - Are either textual or images (non-animated)
|
| - Are clearly marked as adverts and don't try to blend into the
| page
| lykr0n wrote:
| I'm fine with Ads. What I'm not fine with is:
|
| - Intrusive Ads that either demand attention or mask themselves
| as something else
|
| - Ads that are based on targeted information pulled from other
| sources, such as other websites.
|
| - Ads that are just completely off topic. I'm fine with general
| targeting. "male" "computer science" "linux" stuff like that
| Abishek_Muthian wrote:
| Does the lists used in adblockers like UBlock Origin whitelist
| Ads from this company, are there any other advertising
| companies with similar philosophies?
| ffpip wrote:
| uBlock Origin whitelists nothing. You decide what to let in.
|
| I've noticed it blocks carbonads, ethicalads and even ads on
| DDG.
|
| I turned it off on DDG and notepad++ sites, to let ads
| through. If you want you can too.
| Abishek_Muthian wrote:
| Thanks, have carbon ads gained good reputation? I've been
| seeing it increasingly on small project sites, but most of
| the time the Ads have been from adobe.
| ffpip wrote:
| I don't whitelist whole ad networks. So don't really know
| their reputataion.
|
| I whitelist specific sites (some sites I like, and
| reddit)
| skinkestek wrote:
| You'll find that a number of HNers, including a number of high
| profile ones are against any form for advertising.
|
| Personally I am against tracking and unethical ads[0] but I
| think purely contextual ads can be OK:
|
| - ycombinator ads on news.ycombinator.com: OK with me even if
| they blend in, it is part of what I want to see when I am here
|
| - Webstorm/IntelliJ/upcoming programming conference ads on
| developer blogs: Smashing
|
| - "Sponsored by" ads on Open Source projects (as long as they
| aren't bad[1]): fine with me
|
| [0][1]: like pushing payday loans to poor, gambling to addicts,
| cheating sites etc
| oska wrote:
| > You'll find that a number of HNers, including a number of
| high profile ones are against any form for advertising.
|
| Yep, this is me (although I'm not at all 'high profile').
| Specifically, I'm against all _push_ advertising, where ads
| are being served to a user when they are not actively looking
| for product /service information. If it's a site that is
| _all_ advertising or nearly all advertising with some filler
| editorial then I 'm fine with that because obviously a user
| is not going to go to that site unless they want to be
| marketed too and are _actively_ looking for product /service
| information (including about products/services of which they
| were previously unaware).
| DoctorNick wrote:
| is this just a searx instance that's been loaded with ads?
| didip wrote:
| The video search is broken for me, tested on Chrome with the
| keyword "golang". It's just showing blank.
| petra wrote:
| Any info on search operators ? And do they work, unlike Google ?
|
| And where's the source ? could i create search plugins just for
| my own use ? because that would be a killer feature.
|
| So it's only technically open-source, it uses Bing's API probably
| for their "web" tab.[1]
|
| Their "infinity tab" doesn't give good results at all, currently.
| This is what may run on their own system. Maybe.
|
| [1]"How It Works For the web application, we use Flask. For the
| search results, we use the Microsoft Cognitive Services Search
| API and the DuckDuckGo Instant Answers API. We will have more
| detailed information about how our system works in the future."
|
| -- from their source :
| https://gitlab.com/infinitysearch/infinity-search
| searchableguy wrote:
| > If you have ever used DuckDuckGo before, we integrated the
| same bang feature as them so that you can redirect your
| searches to other websites directly from our site. Here is an
| example: https://infinitysearch.co/results?q=!ddg privacy Right
| now, we have the same ones as DuckDuckGo so you can use the
| same ones found at https://duckduckgo.com/bang for now.
|
| > The whole Infinity Search system is open source and the code
| can be found at https://gitlab.com/infinitysearch.
|
| From the FAQ here: https://infinitysearch.co/why
| kgraves wrote:
| I saw everything this search engine has to offer, all looks good
| except their _' Ethical Ads'_. What does that even mean?
|
| There should be NO ads. period.
|
| I would go so far to say that ALL ads are a distraction.
|
| You're supposed to be an open source privacy focused search
| engine, not a surveillance capitalist serving search ads like
| Google, this is NOT OK.
| hinkley wrote:
| How do you propose to pay for the infrastructure?
| oska wrote:
| Apart from you question not being in good faith (because
| there have always been business models to support publishing
| and providing services that do not rely on adverstising and
| these models are well known), the main point is that they do
| not have to provide the answer to this question. Push
| advertising is unethical and culturally toxic and thus is not
| justifiable using the simple pragmatic argument of "It pays
| the bills". You can't justify unethical behaviour using a
| simple pragmatic argument. (Quite obviously; this shouldn't
| even need to be said.)
| faitswulff wrote:
| If GPT-3 is trained on a corpus of the entire internet, could you
| just use it as a search engine by posing questions to it?
| freediver wrote:
| No, but it can look deceivingly able to:
|
| https://twitter.com/paraschopra/status/1284801028676653060
|
| (and this is how to prime it:
|
| https://twitter.com/vybhavram/status/1284803750146617344)
|
| The main problem is that GPT3 has a free will of a creative but
| delusional person and will distort facts as it pleases to
| maximize its output function score.
|
| So, similar to evening news.
| worldsayshi wrote:
| Hmm, can you turn GPT-3 api into a fact checker by priming it
| with tuples of (in)correct statements, true/false? And then
| maybe prime it to add explanations and references for the
| responses as well.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Yes, but it's only effective for things a few months before
| its creation; anything after that is just "sounds plausible
| to GPT-3". Likewise, its explanations aren't very good
| unless it has good domain knowledge on the subject; if it
| doesn't know something, it won't tell you so unless you've
| primed it with not-knowing being an option.
|
| https://www.gwern.net/GPT-3#expressing-uncertainty
| softwaredoug wrote:
| I wish there was a way to differentiate a "search engine" as in
| one that crawls the web and a "search engine" like Elastic or
| Solr.
|
| Maybe the latter should be a search server?
| nkristoffersen wrote:
| wouldn't a crawler be a "web crawler"? It doesn't actually
| handle the search engine aspects.
| somurzakov wrote:
| search engine vs full-text search engine?
| searchableguy wrote:
| Google would count as a full text search engine then.
| penagwin wrote:
| Web search engines generally are also full text search
| engines.
|
| This project is useless for people who have their own
| private text to search.
| ralusek wrote:
| Web search vs application search?
| tekkk wrote:
| I think the correct terms would be "web search engine" or "web
| search" and "search engine" or "full-text search engine".
| Wikipedia says "web search engine". But I agree, the ubiquity
| of Google as the "search engine" makes it a bit muddy to
| acknowledge that a search engine is any program or system that
| is used to search data. It's an interesting information
| retrieval concept that can be applied to many things.
| 1_person wrote:
| I think it's a lot easier to maintain clarity when we identify
| this as what it actually is: yet another low effort front end
| for the Bing search engine's API, which aims to attract and
| monetize privacy-conscious consumers with a big lie.
| Dowwie wrote:
| Very cool to see innovation emerging from Oklahoma!
| tgb wrote:
| If the devs are reading this, I found a bug: if you use the
| wikipedia bang and search, say: "!w knot theory" the actual
| search page it brings up is for "knottheory" without the space.
| grey_earthling wrote:
| Also if you search for just "!w", you don't arrive at the
| English Wikipedia front page, which is the behaviour I'm used
| to from DuckDuckGo. "!bbc" should also lead to the BBC front
| page, etc.
| wirelessbrain wrote:
| What's the difference between "web" and "infinity" search? It
| doesn't seem to be explained anywhere.
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(page generated 2020-08-07 23:00 UTC)