garden/agora search.md

Agora Search

https://twitter.com/flancian/status/1399779789368664065

• The agora is in essence equivalent to a distributed wiki.
  • Note you could theoretically use a wiki to crowdsource search results; in the limit, think of having a wiki page for every likely user query.
  • Perhaps agora search tries to find a good match for your query locally and redirects to other agoras in the network or to google or duckduckgo if a good local result isn't available.
    • When it volunteers something, it also offers to continue your query in the search authority of your choice.
  • push and pull could be used to offer hints for how to route queries to relevant results.
• The agora can already be used as a search engine.
  • To do so, you can use the following URL template in your browser of choice: https://anagora.org/search?q=%s
    • Searching this way behaves the same way as searching using the text box always at the top of this agora.
  • As of 2021-02-27, you can also just use open search to add the agora as a search engine; this works at least on firefox. You should be able to see the agora as an available search engine to add in the search box.
  • The agora will try to serve any relevant nodes for your queries -- useful for when you have notes on the topic you're searching for.
    • In every case, the agora will try to make it easy for you to 'click through' and continue your search elsewhere -- in established search engines or the websites of your choice.
• Agora Search is crowdsourced search for the open internet.
• user story https://twitter.com/flancian/status/1350835941603221504
• keywords https://twitter.com/flancian/status/1352671899583713288
• pull crowdsourced search
• This agora tries to search all agoras, and also the internet as it manifests an intent to cooperate.
  • See stoa.
  • You can use open search to add it to your browser while you're visiting it.
  • You can have it as default search engine, like I sometimes do, or you can associate it with a prefix. I use 'a' and 'an'. Like in 'an entity'.
• 2021-02-27
  • Hooking up with yubnub seems like a good idea.
  • Working on general usability in parallel.

Design

• In agora server, /search / /exec does the following:
  • It takes a query string in argument 'q' (sort of standard).
  • It optionally tokenizes the query string (unsure if this is the right stage for tokenizing, or tokenization should be done ad-hoc by search providers to allow for domain-specific tweaks).
  • It offers the query string or the tokens to search providers, essentially hooks that volunteer actions or results -- perhaps as bids in a distributed system modelled as a market (later).
  • It scores the alternatives and either chooses one for the user (based on programmable rules) or presents them as alternatives.
  • The default action is 'redirect to the agora node matching/encoding the query'.
  • Also supported currently:
    • go, which redirects immediately to a go link if present in the parameter node or a combination.

https://merveilles.town/web/statuses/105997152161798151 https://twitter.com/flancian/status/1379495094001238026