156 lines
6.4 KiB
Markdown
156 lines
6.4 KiB
Markdown
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# Mwmbl - **No ads, no tracking, no cruft, no profit**
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[](https://matrix.to/#/#mwmbl:matrix.org)
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Mwmbl is a non-profit, ad-free, free-libre and free-lunch search
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engine with a focus on useability and speed. At the moment it is
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little more than an idea together with a [proof of concept
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implementation](https://mwmbl.org/) of
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the web front-end and search technology on a small index.
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Our vision is a community working to provide top quality search
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particularly for hackers, funded purely by donations.
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Crawling
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========
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**Update 2022-02-05:** We now have a distributed crawler that runs on
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our volunteers' machines! If you have Firefox you can help out by
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[installing our
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extension](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/mwmbl-web-crawler/). This
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will crawl the web in the background, retrieving one page a second. It
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does not use or access any of your personal data. Instead it crawls
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the web at random, using the top scoring sites on Hacker News as seed
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pages. After extracting a summary of each page, it batches these up
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and sends the data to a central server to be stored and indexed.
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Why a non-profit search engine?
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===============================
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The motives of ad-funded search engine are at odds with providing an
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optimal user experience. These sites are optimised for ad revenue,
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with user experience taking second place. This means that pages are
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loaded with ads which are often not clearly distinguished from search
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results. Also, eitland on Hacker News
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[comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29427442):
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> Thinking about it it seems logical that for a search engine that
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> practically speaking has monopoly both on users and as mattgb points
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> out - [to some] degree also on indexing - serving the correct answer
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> first is just dumb: if they can keep me going between their search
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> results and tech blogs with their ads embedded one, two or five
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> times extra that means one, two or five times more ad impressions.
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But what about...?
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==================
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The space of alternative search engines has expanded rapidly in recent
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years. Here's a very incomplete list of some that have interested me:
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- [YaCy](https://yacy.net/) - an open source distributed search engine
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- [search.marginalia.nu](https://search.marginalia.nu/) - a search
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engine favouring text-heavy websites
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- [Gigablast](https://gigablast.com/) - a privacy-focused search
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engine whose owner makes money by selling the technology to third
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parties
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- [Brave](https://search.brave.com/)
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- [DuckDuckGo](https://duckduckgo.com/)
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Of these, YaCy is the closest in spirit to the idea of a non-profit
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search engine. The index is distributed across a peer-to-peer
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network. Unfortunately this design decision makes search very slow.
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Marginalia Search is fantastic, but it is more of a personal project
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than an open source community.
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All other search engines that I've come across are for-profit. Please
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let me know if I've missed one!
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Designing for non-profit
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========================
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To be a good search engine, we need to store many items, but the cost
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of running the engine is at least proportional to the number of items
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stored. Our main consideration is thus to reduce the cost per item
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stored.
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The design is founded on the observation that most items rank for a
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small set of terms. In the extreme version of this, where each item
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ranks for a single term, the usual inverted index design is grossly
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inefficient, since we have to store each term at least twice: once in
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the index and once in the item data itself.
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Our design is a giant hash map. We have a single store consisting of a
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fixed number N of pages. Each page is of a fixed size (currently 4096
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bytes to match a page of memory), and consists of a compressed list of
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items. Given a term for which we want an item to rank, we compute a
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hash of the term, a value between 0 and N - 1. The item is then stored
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in the corresponding page.
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To retrieve pages, we simply compute the hash of the terms in the user
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query and load the corresponding pages, filter the items to those
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containing the term and rank the items. Since each page is small, this
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can be done very quickly.
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Because we compress the list of items, we can rank for more than a
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single term and maintain an index smaller than the inverted index
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design. Well, that's the theory. This idea has yet to be tested out on
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a large scale.
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How to contribute
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=================
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There are lots of ways to help:
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- [Help us crawl the
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web](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/mwmbl-web-crawler/)
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- [Donate some money](https://opencollective.com/mwmbl) towards
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hosting costs and supporting our volunteers
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- Give feedback/suggestions
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- Help out with development of the engine itself
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If you would like to help in any of these or other ways, thank you!
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Please join our [Matrix chat
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server](https://matrix.to/#/#mwmbl:matrix.org) or email the main
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author (email address is in the git commit history).
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Development
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===========
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### Local Testing
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This will run against a local test database without running background
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tasks to update batches etc.
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This is the simplest way to configure postgres, but you can set it up
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how you like as long as the `DATABASE_URL` you give is correct for
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your configuration.
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1. Install postgres and create a user for your current username
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2. Install [poetry](https://python-poetry.org/docs/#installation)
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3. Run `poetry install` to install dependencies
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4. Run `poetry shell` in the root directory to enter the virtual environment
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5. Run `$ DATABASE_URL="postgres://username@" python -m mwmbl.main` replacing "username" with your username.
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### Using Dokku
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Note: this method is not recommended as it is more involved, and your index will not have any data in it unless you
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set up a crawler to crawl to your server. You will need to set up your own Backblaze or S3 equivalent storage, or
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have access to the production keys, which we probably won't give you.
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Follow the [deployment instructions](https://github.com/mwmbl/mwmbl/wiki/Deployment)
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Frequently Asked Question
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=========================
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### How do you pronounce "mwmbl"?
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Like "mumble". I live in
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[Mumbles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mumbles), which is spelt
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"Mwmbwls" in Welsh. But the intended meaning is "to mumble", as in
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"don't search, just mwmbl!"
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