this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2024
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We'd love to build a distributed search engine, but it would be too slow I think. When you send us a query we go and search 8 billion+ pages, and bring back the top 10, 20....up to 1,000 results. For a good service we need to do that in 200ms, and thus one needs to centralise the index. It took years, several iterations and our carefully designed algos & architecture to make something so fast. No doubt Google, Bing, Yandex & Baidu went through similar hoops. Maybe, I'm wrong and/or someone can make it work with our API.
I think 200ms is an expectation of big tech. I know people have very little patience these days, but if you provided better quality searches in 5 seconds people would probably prefer that over a .2 second response of the crap we’re currently getting from the big guys. Even better if you can make the wait a little fun with some animations, public domain art, or quotes to read while waiting.
This is precisely what made me switch to ChatGPT as my primary "search engine". Even DDG is fucking useless these days if you need anything more complex than a list of popular sites that contain a couple of keywords.
I'm designing off the top of my head, but I think you could do it with a DHT, or even just steal some distributed ledger algorithm from a blockchain. Or, you develop a distributed skip tree -- but you're right, any sort of distributed query is going to have a possibly unacceptable latency. So you might -- like Bitcoin -- distributed the index itself to participants (which could be large), but federate the indexing operation s.t. rather than a dozen different search engine crawlers hitting each web site, you'd have one or two crawlers per site feeding the shared index.
Distributed search engines have existed for over a decade. Several solutions for distributed Lucene clusters exist (SOLR, katta, ElasticSearch, O2) and while they're mostly designed to be run in a LAN where the latencies between nodes is small, I don't think it's impossible to imagine a fairly low-latency distributed, replicated index where the nodes have a small subset of peer nodes which, together, encompass the entire index. No instance has the same set of peer nodes, but the combined index is eventually consistent.
Again, I'm thinking more about federating and distributing the index-building, to reduce web sites being hammered by search engines which constitute 80% of their traffic. Federating and distributing the query mechanism is a harder problem, but there's a lot of existing R&D in this area, and technologies that could be borrowed from other domains (the aforementioned DHT and distributed ledger algorithms).