New Search Engines

Discussing new , Open Source and not

[smilie]

Discussing new search engines, Open Source and not.

Such as Yacy.net , Faroo.com , Sphinxsearch.com , Lemurproject.org , or any one you particularly like.

[WolfgangSB]

So what do you think about [metager.net...] ?

[iamlost]

Most folks here probably only play with Google but may recognise Baidu, Bing, Duck Duck Go, Yahoo, Yandex... :)

Quick synopsis for the broader SE challenged of the mentions above:

The Lemur Project is run by Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval (CIIR) at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and the Language Technologies Institute (LTI) at Carnegie Mellon University. It includes a number of tools including the Indri search engine.
Note: an intranet or site SE rather than an internet SE.

Sphinx is an open source full text search server.
---Craigslist uses Sphinx.
Note: an intranet or site SE rather than an internet SE.

Faroo is a peer-to-peer SE meaning that data is stored on users computers rather than at a central server.
YaCy is another peer-to-peer SE.
Note: both are basically trying to build to IPO on others backs much as Uber et al.

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MetaGer is an open source meta-search engine aka it's query results are derived by querying other SEs à la IxQuick, which is probably better known. Also as with IxQuick it touts privacy as a selling point.

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I wouldn't actually call any of the above 'new' except in the sense that this might be the first time someone has heard of them.

There are no shortage of search engines of all sorts. A few simple searches on one of the general SEs easily pulls up over a hundred. It's really a matter of identifying requirements and then picking the best couple for comparison and filter bubble busting purposes. Rinse and repeat as needed.

[smilie]

@iamlost, great overview.

Tell me what you think about distributed P2P search engines. Their time has come?

Also, do you think any of them have a chance to get big enough, like DuckDuckGo?

[not2easy]

Just a note here as we may be straying from the scope of this forum. The Alternative Search Engines Charter [webmasterworld.com] is limiting discussions to search engines that meet some specific criteria, not the latest version of some open source scripts.

1) University backing (eg, Discoweb became the Teoma search engine, Yuntis is currently a University project, Vivisimo started as university research, etc.
2) Venture Capital Funding: Teoma got funding from Hawk Holdings, Qwest, etc - because they saw potential. Google got funding for similar reason, so did Kartoo, Mooter, etc. If the engine has somebody with financial resources backing it, then odds are they will generate enough press to garner user interest, and thus start driving traffic - which is exactly the type of engine we want to talk about - those that can drive traffic.
3) Unique or novel information presentation: Kartoo has a unique interface, and when Vivisimo launched it was one of the first engines with on the fly clustering by topic, similar to what NorthernLight did by hand in its past format.
4) Indexing at least 20-50 million urls: If the engine doesn't have a large enough database to hold a significant portion of the webmap then the odds are, as a general search engine, it will fail to gain significant enough adoption to appear on anybody's radar.

The reason an engine must meet some of these criteria is that in this day & age, it takes a halfway competent programmer a weekend to slap together another open source script to index about 5-10 million urls. We aren't here to discuss every engine on the planet, just those that will get enough market share to become great one day, or to become used by enough people to be worth actively promoting one's own position within their database.

Please verify that any links and discussions are limited to search engines that meet the criteria listed there or they may need to be removed. Thank you!

[lucy24]

<continuing topic drift>

Indexing at least 20-50 million urls: If the engine doesn't have a large enough database to hold a significant portion of the webmap then the odds are, as a general search engine, it will fail to gain significant enough adoption to appear on anybody's radar.

I read this and immediately thought of language-specific search engines. There may be less than a million or less than 100,000 URLs in your language worldwide--but if it's a language Google doesn't know (yes, they exist), that's a viable though niche-in-the-extreme market.
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I think I once looked up why it's td and not tc, but I can't remember the reason.