
Infinity: open-source search engine - freediver
https://infinitysearch.co
======
adsjhdashkj
Neat, their ads are powered by:
[https://www.ethicalads.io/](https://www.ethicalads.io/)

This makes me wonder - what ads would be acceptable in the eyes of privacy
focused developers? Any?

And i don't mean UX - i mean, what ads would you, a privacy focused developer,
recommend i install on my site. Assuming i want to fully respect by users
privacy, while still attempting to pay for the server costs.

Maybe this warrants a AskHN, but it seems relevant here as they're
implementing this exact concept. Thoughts?

~~~
chris_f
I've spent a lot of time over the last few months looking at different privacy
focused forms of monetization, specifically aimed at search engines because of
my use case. [0]

The main factor determining your options is whether you are comfortable having
a 3rd party ad provider have access to the IP, user agent (and potentially
search term in some cases) of your users.

If that is not a dealbreaker for your use case then there are a lot of
different options, including EthicalAds which I believe is a great service.

Understandably, the main reasons for this are because the ad networks need to
prevent fraud, and the ad sponsors usually want some kind of measurable metric
to determine ROI.

If you are not comfortable with the above compromise then your options for
contextual advertising are significantly limited with the only real option
being to sell direct ads to companies.

[0] [https://coil.com/p/runnaroo/Privacy-and-Search-Engine-
Moneti...](https://coil.com/p/runnaroo/Privacy-and-Search-Engine-
Monetization/5dXAW6NwF)

~~~
wintermutestwin
>with the only real option being to sell direct ads to companies.

Maybe I don't understand the complexity behind the ad-network curtain today,
but direct ad sales worked fine pre-internet. Serve the ads from the same
domain as your content and you can prevent ad blocking. Sounds like a win-win
to me.

~~~
NotSammyHagar
Almost all companies won't bother with buying ads directly from a random small
company, because they don't know if you are trustworthy or won't show up some
controversial content that hurts their brand. Much easier to use an ad bundler
(from their standpoint) like google.

------
numpad0
> When you search for something on our site, we take the results from other
> search engines and our own indexes,

~~~
qihqi
Currently its just Bing: [https://gitlab.com/infinitysearch/infinity-
search/-/blob/mas...](https://gitlab.com/infinitysearch/infinity-
search/-/blob/master/MainApplication/Aggregator/CombineResults.py#L46)

~~~
harryf
Since Yahoo! got out of the game, Bing is the only major search engine in the
English speaking world providing an API for developers against their index.

Yandex _might_ be another option (haven’t looked) or even Baidu. Of course
there are unofficial ways to scrape Google but you can’t build a legit
business on that.

Side note: a far simpler first step than trying to break up Google would be
requiring them to have a search API and contractual obligations that enable
others to do business on top of it.

~~~
skyfaller
Yes, adversarial interoperability is a fantastic antitrust tool that isn't
discussed or used enough these days:
[https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-
interopera...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-
interoperability)

~~~
chaosharmonic
This would have been a _great_ way to deal with Facebook's attempt at building
out a single backend for their messaging platforms.

Because yes, the ability to use a single protocol for cross-service messaging,
with E2E by default, disappearing messages, and text (or presumably email)
fallback would actually be spectacular. _But as a spec._

Hell, as a spec, this would create an argument to migrate toward a
user@service model and finally start relegating phone numbers to legacy
status.

------
softwaredoug
I wish there was a way to differentiate a “search engine” as in one that
crawls the web and a “search engine” like Elastic or Solr.

Maybe the latter should be a search server?

~~~
somurzakov
search engine vs full-text search engine?

~~~
searchableguy
Google would count as a full text search engine then.

~~~
penagwin
Web search engines generally are also full text search engines.

This project is useless for people who have their own private text to search.

------
tgb
If the devs are reading this, I found a bug: if you use the wikipedia bang and
search, say: "!w knot theory" the actual search page it brings up is for
"knottheory" without the space.

~~~
grey_earthling
Also if you search for just "!w", you don't arrive at the English Wikipedia
front page, which is the behaviour I'm used to from DuckDuckGo. "!bbc" should
also lead to the BBC front page, etc.

------
fsflover
See also: peer to peer free search engine [https://yacy.net](https://yacy.net)

------
rmetzler
I find it really disturbing that you can't link to result pages. I think this
is some kind of REST principles violation.

~~~
Mandatum
Guessed the param on first try:

[https://infinitysearch.co/results?q=test](https://infinitysearch.co/results?q=test)

------
surround
I’d like to mention that DuckDuckGo’s backend is not open source.

------
faitswulff
If GPT-3 is trained on a corpus of the entire internet, could you just use it
as a search engine by posing questions to it?

~~~
freediver
No, but it can look deceivingly able to:

[https://twitter.com/paraschopra/status/1284801028676653060](https://twitter.com/paraschopra/status/1284801028676653060)

(and this is how to prime it:

[https://twitter.com/vybhavram/status/1284803750146617344](https://twitter.com/vybhavram/status/1284803750146617344))

The main problem is that GPT3 has a free will of a creative but delusional
person and will distort facts as it pleases to maximize its output function
score.

So, similar to evening news.

~~~
worldsayshi
Hmm, can you turn GPT-3 api into a fact checker by priming it with tuples of
(in)correct statements, true/false? And then maybe prime it to add
explanations and references for the responses as well.

~~~
wizzwizz4
Yes, but it's only effective for things a few months before its creation;
anything after that is just “sounds plausible to GPT-3”. Likewise, its
explanations aren't very good unless it has good domain knowledge on the
subject; if it doesn't know something, it won't tell you so unless you've
primed it with not-knowing being an option.

[https://www.gwern.net/GPT-3#expressing-
uncertainty](https://www.gwern.net/GPT-3#expressing-uncertainty)

------
petra
Any info on search operators ? And do they work, unlike Google ?

And where's the source ? could i create search plugins just for my own use ?
because that would be a killer feature.

So it's only technically open-source, it uses Bing's API probably for their
"web" tab.[1]

Their "infinity tab" doesn't give good results at all, currently. This is what
may run on their own system. Maybe.

[1]"How It Works For the web application, we use Flask. For the search
results, we use the Microsoft Cognitive Services Search API and the DuckDuckGo
Instant Answers API. We will have more detailed information about how our
system works in the future."

\-- from their source : [https://gitlab.com/infinitysearch/infinity-
search](https://gitlab.com/infinitysearch/infinity-search)

~~~
searchableguy
> If you have ever used DuckDuckGo before, we integrated the same bang feature
> as them so that you can redirect your searches to other websites directly
> from our site. Here is an example:
> [https://infinitysearch.co/results?q=!ddg](https://infinitysearch.co/results?q=!ddg)
> privacy Right now, we have the same ones as DuckDuckGo so you can use the
> same ones found at
> [https://duckduckgo.com/bang](https://duckduckgo.com/bang) for now.

> The whole Infinity Search system is open source and the code can be found at
> [https://gitlab.com/infinitysearch](https://gitlab.com/infinitysearch).

From the FAQ here:
[https://infinitysearch.co/why](https://infinitysearch.co/why)

------
Animats
Hm. Another company in this space, like Neeva. Are people seeing opportunities
going up against Google?

~~~
esperent
This is the first one I've seen that's open source, however.

------
Dowwie
Very cool to see innovation emerging from Oklahoma!

------
DoctorNick
is this just a searx instance that's been loaded with ads?

------
Tanath
> You will need to enable JavaScript to view the results. If you do not, the
> loading bar below will keep staying that way.

Really? Or you could fix your site.

------
wirelessbrain
What's the difference between "web" and "infinity" search? It doesn't seem to
be explained anywhere.

------
declank
Not sure why this post is getting scathing criticism, but this would be a nice
project to fork for a metasearch engine.

------
didip
The video search is broken for me, tested on Chrome with the keyword "golang".
It's just showing blank.

------
kgraves
I saw everything this search engine has to offer, all looks good except their
_' Ethical Ads'_. What does that even mean?

There should be NO ads. period.

I would go so far to say that ALL ads are a distraction.

You're supposed to be an open source privacy focused search engine, not a
surveillance capitalist serving search ads like Google, this is NOT OK.

~~~
hinkley
How do you propose to pay for the infrastructure?

~~~
oska
Apart from you question not being in good faith (because there have always
been business models to support publishing and providing services that do not
rely on adverstising and these models are well known), the main point is that
they do not have to provide the answer to this question. Push advertising is
unethical and culturally toxic and thus is not justifiable using the simple
pragmatic argument of "It pays the bills". You can't justify unethical
behaviour using a simple pragmatic argument. (Quite obviously; this shouldn't
even need to be said.)

~~~
google234123
Fine then, how about a compromise: The people that are fine with ads can get
it for free and people that have an ethical problem with ads can pay.

~~~
oska
That's not a compromise; that's worse.

What it's essentially saying is that the publisher should be able to continue
to act unethically in polluting minds by pushing ads but _also_ collect extra
money from people who object to their pollution. IOW, "I'm going to keep
polluting but if you pay me then I won't pollute in your personal space." Well
actually, I care about your society wide pollution too. Just stop polluting.

On principle I will _never_ give money to a website that runs this sort of
policy.

