Given a search engine that is privacy respecting that you can self-host on your own hardware.
#askfediverse #search #ngi0 #nlnet #FOSS
How much are you ready to spend on a home server upfront that will last 3 to 5 years and can support your whole family and friends:
I should have started with this:
I am working on a search engine #babelia. Unlike a todoapp, it requires more hardware, having an idea of how much people are willing to spend upfront or by subscription renting a server will help me figure what kind of hardware I need to acquire to be able to test the algorithms.
Thanks for you cooperation! (and please boost!)
@amirouche
I think your low numbers are too high, both for hardware and subscription.
I pay less than 10 bucks for mobile Internet. Yet, somehow, the search engines and all the ad-loaded pages (plus all the hundreds of layers of ad maf... industry) make a living from eating my bandwidth.
It should be 1€. 3 max.
Some people are paying for those ads, hence the cost to run those search engines.
@amirouche can't afford a home server, prob never will.
@amirouche I don't want to have to run a search engine
Thanks to chime in!
Pay-per-search does not work as the only revenue to cover infrastructure because you need to pay for hosting / renting anyway so that it is available when someone needs it.
You made me remember that the server sits idle most of the day: if they are 5 persons doing 100 queries per day where each query takes less than 1 second, the server will be fully busy, all cpu core maxed out, 500 seconds per day that means there is still 85900 seconds available (~23.86 hours) on all CPU cores...
What if the server provides more "services" or "applications" like #NextCloud? Would 10€ per month per users makes sense?
Having too much features is is not good nor easy.
We are gathering on irc at freenode the channel #peacesearch if you want to further discuss the matter.
The features only of the search engine part: https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/babelia
At that does not include taking into account user feedback to be able to program the crawl from the search e.g. via a feed reader.
Also it does not mention interop between search engines which we dive in https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/peacesearch
Thanks to chime in!
A worker system like you describe is much more complicated to develop. Also, in such a system people need to trust each other that they will not game the crawl results.
Bandwidth and crawling is necessary to seed the index and then keep it fresh. The initial index can be shared (like Common Crawl Search Engine does, but with less spam). Keeping the index fresh for a family is doable on a regular fiber or DSL connection, it does not consume much.
The storage is not even costly, english wikipedia + stackoverflow does not even reach 100GB.
What is costly is doing a query under one second. For that you need lots of CPU cores / threads like AMD epyc or Threadripper.
Maybe I did not understand what you wrote?
Now that I think more about it, exchanging queries can work.
We are gathering on irc at freenode the channel #peacesearch if you want to further discuss the matter.
@amirouche By average I use it 50+ times per day. I'm a developer so searching things is an integral part of my work.
Thanks to chime in!
Yes me too. By the way, I found out sometime it is faster from a workflow perspective to lookup the documentation locally for instance man pages or in the case of Python using `pydoc collections.Counter.most_common`
More related to online search ux, the fact that query history is hidden somewhere and there is no way to gather all search queries under an activity tab is painful. Many times, I recall doing a search query about an activity, but can not recall the exact terms. Do you experience something similar?
@amirouche Exactly the same actually! I remember that there was a problem with my xmpp server and it took hours to find a solution online.
I recently had this issue again and knew that I looked it up before but wasn't able to recall what exactly did I ask the search engine. So it took several hours to find again :I
@amirouche I use documentation too. It is a faster way to find what you need once you are "comfy" with the programming language.
A decent mixture of docs and web searches does the trick for me. :)
Based on how search engines work (keep the index fresh, store the data to be queried) a pay-per-use approach is not sustainable
#askfediverse #search #ngi0 #nlnet #foss
How much are you willing to pay for subscription for a search engine per month per person ?
(see the previous pool)