sznowicki

One thing I miss from Twitter that Mastodon has only partially is to be able to search through the network for some keywords, like breaking news, events, and so on, so I can see other people takes on that.

So I made a small project that aims to fill this gap.

I've seen some previous attempts that made many people upset, I hope this time nobody will take their forks and pitches to burn me as it's:

• calling mastodon instances public local timelines via their API
• takes only posts that are made by accounts that OPT-IN to being indexed (there's noindex flag that I honor)
• keeps the posts in database for a short time (currently one hour) to avoid abuse and also to lower costs of running it

It gives me a lot of fun and for me it's quite useful, so I guess someone might find it useful as well.

Also, it's open source, but GPL license so it stays FOSS forever.

Happy to take any feedback, also happy to add some instances that are not yet being listened to. It turns out opt-in people are not that many so adding even large instances doesn't make my server belly up.

Instances: https://github.com/Kukei-eu/kukei-masto/blob/main/server/instances.js

So, in the era of increasingly good AI powered tools and general search engines full of SEO spam, last week I started creating something little old school and against the trends.

For now It's a have-fun-and-find-out project that main aim is to provide good search results for general web development queries with a special focus on independent blog authors.

The thesis is that no SEO spam website is in the index, which will already filter out most annoying noise on Google/Bing.

Search results are grouped per type: docs, blogs and magazines (e.g. blog platforms or bigger websites).

For now it's far from being done in terms of having a full index, but in most cases it already replaces my go-to search engine when I'm looking up some stuff during work.

I'm looking forward hearing out what y'all think and if you think it makes sense overall I can only encourage you to post some links to blogs or docs that are still missing in the index. I'm more than happy to add it to the crawler.

Responds like: "nei, total shit, who would need that" also accepted but constructive critique more appreciated ;)

EDIT: everyone many thanks for all your voices and comments. I'm super grateful for all of them and happy that we have such place like Lemmy!

Original post: https://lemmy.world/post/5251324