The quality of search engines has gone down so much for technical questions.

I’m looking for a way to index sites like stack exchanges, reddit, quora, and research papers. Would this be possible to do this locally with metadata?

  • Anafroj@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    StackExchange dumps are available for Kiwix, the project that allows to use a local dump of Wikipedia. You can find all the available dumps there, including the StackExchange ones. You can even build your own search engine through libs allowing to use those zim files (the dumps), if you want.

  • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.orgEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    I mean, you can easily self host a meta-search engine like Searx, Searx-ng, Whoogle, etc. I run Searx-ng and it sends your queries to multiple engines and aggregates the results for you.

    To host your own search engine, you’d need to crawl and index every site. It’s certainly doable, but it would take a lot of time /effort.

    • PlexSheep@feddit.deEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      I agree. Selfhosting a true search engine is way too much work and infeasible for individuals. Meta search engines however are very feasible and a great option.