So is this just something wrong with Google?

How much space do you have on the server, and how many pages do you intend to scale to?

I just tried it with the query “reckless ben”, and in the “all” tab a lot of the results are from various websites (like kotaku), where do these results come from?

The collection of about 1.073 million pages in extracted text form that I have takes up about 4.8 GiB spread across 15 files (but compressed they’re only 2.1 GiB), so if you were just downloading them until your hard drive filled up you’d have about 107 million pages, and you’d need something like 5TiB for a billion pages. These are the WET files from CC, which are extracted text only. I know the WARC files are made so that if you know the correct offset in bytes, you can take out individual documents without decompressing the whole file, but I’m not sure if the WET ones work the same way. If they do, your pile of text could be a bit less than half the size and still usable with an index.

I don’t know how much more space an index of the data would take up, but I think it really depends on how complicated it is. If the index is super basic, like “give me a keyword and I’ll give you a list of docs that it appears in”, then I think the index should be smaller than the text collection. You use embeddings and stuff, so I don’t know how big it would be.

Marginalia search has about 1 billion pages, and when someone asked how big the index is on disk, he said this: “16 TB for the unprocessed crawl data (compressed). 7.7 TB for the files that actually constitute the index (positions data, reverse index)” I’m guessing that the “unprocessed crawl data” is raw html, and that’s why it’s significantly larger than my Blekko-era Common Crawl extracted text based estimate.

So with an uncompressed pile of extracted text and a Marginalia style index, one billion pages would be about 13 TB on disk. He says “positions data” though, so I think that means that the locations of keywords in documents is part of the index. Probably the original extracted text and the position data don’t both need to be there (and they’re probably about the same size), so you would just pick between having the original documents and needing to use compute to find the keyword positions for ranking, or having the keyword positions for ranking and needing to use compute to reconstruct the original documents (if needed). So if you pick one instead of having both, the whole thing probably just takes up about 7.7TB.

Oh also, downloading these files from the Common Crawl should go really fast. One file has about 73000 documents in it, and takes up around 141 MiB (in it’s compressed form, but that’s the form it’ll be downloaded in.)

These wouldn’t get you recent stuff of course, but they would make the index size way bigger, and so the quality would go up but it would be dated. It would be like resurrecting Blekko. For context, Greg Lindahl said that their largest index was 4 billion pages, but that their crawl frontier was much larger.

Here’s another idea: Download tons of old stuff from the Common Crawl / Blekko, but only keep and index the pages that are inaccessible today. This would make your search engine as competitive [edit: probably complementary is a better word] as possible, because it draws from resources that the other engines don’t have. I’m pretty sure the standard is to prune 404’s from search indexes, which seems very silly to me because cached page content can be served, or a link to the Wayback machine can be given. I suppose there are a couple partial exceptions, because Kagi, Brave, and either yep.com or Yandex will give some results from the wayback machine, but I imagine this is a very small part of what they have.

For promotion, I’d recommend picking the most technically interesting part of your implementation, something that’s really clever, and then making a one page writeup for Paged Out magazine about it (https://pagedout.institute/). They regularly have interesting stuff to read, and they have a pretty decent amount of readers. You could write something longer and send it in to 2600 magazine too, they’d probably be interested even if it was an overview of the project.

Maybe the engine should be bigger first though so people are more enthused when they try it. I think 1 billion pages is around where a search engine starts to seem more normal: that’s about how much Marginalia has. How much space on disk does your index take up right now? Would you say the bottleneck is more the hard drive space or the crawling speed?

Another fun thing to consider is making a meta search engine that functions like MetaCrawler used to, where it gets all (or a bunch of) the available results from all the source engines, and then actually fetches and extracts the text from the linked pages, and then matches the query and ranks the pages independent of what the source engines did. If you’d like to do that, I would recommend adapting the source code of 4get.ca (at least for the scrapers), because the guy who writes it is rather talented at coming up with and maintaining workarounds.

If you monetize this, I’d be interested in working for you. I know Python, HTML, CSS, am familiar with JavaScript, and have a lot of experimental (and successful!) experience with ranking web results.

Also, you might be interested in reading this article (from 2600 magazine) about disappearing search engines: https://archive.org/details/search-timeline In addition to the things in that article, there was a search engine for discord (“Searchcord”) that went away in less than a week after it was announced here (on HN), and there is this recent blog post which lists search engines with independent indexes, a painfully large number of which went away with no announcement: https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-... The author of the 2600 article doesn’t really get into theories about why search engines disappear, but it certainly seems like a lot of them do. I’m curious to know if they disappear for random different reasons, or if it’s just really difficult to make and maintain a search project, or if there’s some other common reason. If you suddenly feel disinclined to work on this project, could you let me know why (maybe anonymously with a new email account or something)? Thanks.

Have you considered also indexing videos that haven’t been deleted?