Federated Search Engine?
Considering the potential of the fediverse, is there any version of that for search engines? Something to break up a major point of internet centralization, fragility, and inertia to change (eg Google will never, ever, offer IPFS searches). Not only would decentralization be inherently beneficial, it would mean we're no longer compelled to hand over private information to centralized unvetted corporations like Google, Microsoft, and DuckDuckGo.
We might be better off going back to web rings, word of mouth, and searching websites like Wikipedia and Imdb directly. I, for one, am sick of being funneled into the same bad results every time I search. The same old forum posts from 10 years ago with outdated information, many of which claim "your question was answered already!" followed by a dead link or a flame war.
I was just telling my friend this
This is the best I know of yet. It's a wrapper for google. You're definitely right that we need a decentralized one that understands the distributed governance structure of the fediverse
No Federation, but Presearch is a Decentralized Search Engine that I've been using for ~6 months now. The results are about what I'd expect from your other major search engines. If you're into crypto they also send you a small portion of their token as a reward when you search, although I don't think they let you withdraw until you get a pretty large amount.
There's an addon for your browser you can download to have it be your default search engine too!
SearXNG is probably the closest equivalent, as it's decentralized, you can host your own, and you can grab search results from over 100 engines with it. Search engines don't really federate like the Fediverse does; they just query each other as proxies for you and return the search results.
Are you asking for something like Searx?
But Searx isn't federated in any way is it?
i think it would be a huge undertaking to actually federate a search engine. What gain would you get from federating?
You can setup your own instance of hosting a Searx search engine once yo have a domain.
https://searx.github.io/searx/
yeah i know that. But that wasn't my question. It's about the "Federation" Part.
My SearX instance wouldn't be connected to anyone else's SearX instance and wouldn't get any benefit / information from other instances.