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JsonDemWitOstertoday at 5:41 AM6 repliesview on HN

While a lot of people are concerned with local model performance, I wonder how feasible is it now to run a local indexed web search? Surely running an old school Google is possible with the beefy AI rigs today. I know the problem will be crawling which would be bottlenecked by the ISP but I use Google to search SO, Wikipedia, programming language docs, Github issues, and AWS docs. I think a feasible workflow would be to build a set of sites of most interest to you and then prioritize those in crawling.

While typing this out I remembered https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Search_Appliance which I never personally used but shows feasibility for the idea. I'm pretty sure one of the newly-announced Macbooks is more than up to the task of matching GSA's offering.


Replies

Jskeweltoday at 6:23 AM

Impossible. The majority of websites firewall automated crawler traffic (because of the rise of the bots), only making exceptions for the largest search engines. There is no possibility of starting a new crawler.

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nairboontoday at 8:08 AM

It's still kind of an open problem. There are partial solutions, but not yet really an integrated one. There is Hister: https://hister.org/ that builds some sort of drive-by index of what you're browsing anyway. And there are "true p2p" solutions like YaCy: https://yacy.net/ but it takes ages to crawl the open web (and lots of storage). There's still a lot of optimization to do in this space.

tingletechtoday at 7:42 AM

SearXNG configured as in the OpenWebUI docs is pretty cool. My "Hello World" with a new agent framework is teaching it to use SearXNG. Hook this in as a tool and the agent can answer a lot of questions.

SearXNG is more of a metasearch, the dude who wrote it pops in on here and is working on a cool sounding project that is more like a local personal search engine, I forget the name, but I've been meaning to check it out.

There is also Common Crawl.

https://docs.openwebui.com/features/chat-conversations/web-s...

https://github.com/brian-learns/xng-agent

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Jakobtoday at 6:03 AM

Until 10 years ago, i used Dash for that. It’s still around https://kapeli.com/dash

It’s instant, works offline, auto-updates, and includes all the websites you listed, and allows for custom ones too.

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CobrastanJorjitoday at 6:06 AM

Plausible. Figure 100 GB each of search index for Stack Overflow, Wikipedia, and GitHub issues, then add a dozen more for docs of all your favorite techs. So maybe half a terabyte. Download and build updated dumps of those once every week or two, and it'd work pretty well. Impractical, but possible.