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Gemini Universal Search

solderpunk <solderpunk (a) SDF.ORG>

I am very pleased to share with the list that I have been made aware
of an exciting new Gemini project - our first search engine!  It's
called Gemini Universal Search, or (delightfully![1]) GUS for short.
You can find it at gemini://gus.guru/, and there's now a link to it
from the gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space page.  GUS is a project by
Natalie Pendragon, who is subscribed to this list.

In addition to hopefully being an incentive for people to start
producing content, this raises a number of interesting discussion
points for the community.

One technical question is the issue of how server admins can opt out
of having their stuff crawled.  GUS currently recognises a /robots.txt
resource with (I presume) identical syntax to that used for HTTP.
This is certainly one potential solution to the problem (and perhaps
the most sensible one), but we might want to consider others.

One more "community" oriented question is how we might like a Gemini
search engine to work.  Currently, as I understand it, GUS functions
entirely based on the content of resources.  It does not take into
account linking structure, in the way that mainstream web search
engines do.  Depending upon one's perspective, this might be a good
thing or a bad thing.  In general, the way search engines work can
influence the way that people tend to produce content, as people avoid
doing things that they know will lower their search ranking.  It's
well worth thinking about negative consequences this has had for the
web that we want to avoid repeating in Geminispace.

Cheers,
Solderpunk

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gus_Grissom

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Bradley D. Thornton <Bradley (a) NorthTech.US>

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On 2/25/2020 11:43 AM, solderpunk wrote:
> I am very pleased to share with the list that I have been made
> aware of an exciting new Gemini project - our first search engine!
> It's called Gemini Universal Search, or (delightfully![1]) GUS for
> short.

Oh Goodies! Because Betty still is still single after Archie dumped
her and married Veronica instead at the end of the series/saga (True
story) ;)

GUS <3 Betty

> One more "community" oriented question is how we might like a
> Gemini search engine to work.  Currently, as I understand it, GUS
> functions entirely based on the content of resources.

Yes that is preferable from my perspective. It's a problem with
VERONICA and VERONICA2 that only indexes the text in the selector
strings. Although that is highly useful, it is  no substitute for
indexing the actual content itself.

Jughead (jugtail) is a local indexer.

Thank you Natalie! :)


- -- 
Bradley D. Thornton
Manager Network Services
http://NorthTech.US
TEL: +1.310.421.8268
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Natalie Pendragon <natpen (a) natpen.net>

On Wed, Feb 26, 2020 at 07:25:24PM -0800, Bradley D. Thornton wrote:
> Yes that is preferable from my perspective. It's a problem with
> VERONICA and VERONICA2 that only indexes the text in the selector
> strings. Although that is highly useful, it is  no substitute for
> indexing the actual content itself.

Wow, I had no idea that's how Veronica worked - no wonder I've had
trouble (re)finding some things with it in the past!

In addition to this thread, I've had a couple other conversations and
votes for content-based indexing over network-based indexing. So, I
think I'll keep it that way for now, and focus on improving the
tokenization/indexing quality.

I also just added search suggestions in the case of no results found,
which could be helpful in the case the searcher makes a query typo. It
also helps in the case of legitimately no results, which isn't too
far-fetched given the small amount of content we currently have :P

If anyone has other thoughts about desired features or undesired
anti-features please let me know. I want to make something useful, but
I also want to make sure the project is kind and respectful to Gemini
content creators :)

Natalie

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Julien Blanchard <julien (a) typed-hole.org>

Hello,

Not sure it has already been mentioned here, there is an unofficial 
#gemini IRC channel on tilde.chat if you're in the mood for chat.

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Ben <benulo (a) systemli.org>

Not XMPP!?

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