[Freedombox-discuss] is a distributed search engine (e.g. YaCy) to be part of the FB package?

[Luka Marčetić]

On 07/15/2011 03:45 PM, James Vasile wrote:
> On Fri, 15 Jul 2011 11:08:48 +0200, Eugen Leitl<eugen at leitl.org>  wrote:
>> Admittedly, the index can get large, but on the hand
>> SSD has more IOPS.
> The box as shipped will have a relatively small subset of possible
> packages (just as Debian installation has a small subset of the repo's
> packages).  My guess is that distributed search is not likely to be in
> that small subset.  We've always considered search to be somewhat beyond
> the scope of the FreedomBox, largely because search is hard and
> expensive, even in this distributed fashion.

You mean the Freedombox foundation? Why is that? We're in the business 
of distributing/'dehierarchizing'  things - as far as I'm concerned, 
that's FB's main mission. Search is a very important web tool. Not as 
important as a distributed alternative to DNS, but more important than 
distributed storage. Many use "the cloud" for storage, but *all* search 
the web, and in light of recent auto-complete filters for stuff like 
mediafire, dropping all .co.cc domains (actually subdomains, but still), 
not to mention the great Chinese firewall, it's important to have a 
non-oligopolized alternative. You can encrypt your data and upload it to 
multiple cloud services anonymously. But if Google denies to show you a 
site, how will you know it exists? I'd vote for a software package such 
as YaCy being installed by default, but perhaps unchecked in the 'choose 
software' list. Selecting it during the installation, though, would 
activate it for the world (depending on further settigns), much like a 
proxy, Tor, or anything else.

Luka Marčetić