Mwmbl: Free, open-source and non-profit search engine

(mwmbl.org)

209 points | by marcodiego 312 days ago

34 comments

  • xenodium 312 days ago
    If keen on some minor feedback (specially for mobile), you can likely cut down on landing page text:

    From:

        MWMBL
    
        [Search on mwmbl...]
    
        Welcome to mwmbl, the free, open-source and non-profit search engine.
    
        You can start searching by using the search bar above!
    
        Find more on
    
        [Github] [Wiki]
    
    To:

        MWMBL
    
        [Search on mwmbl...]
    
        A free, open-source and non-profit search engine.
    
        [Github] [Wiki]
    • daoudc 311 days ago
      Thanks, feel free to send a PR!
  • mdaniel 312 days ago
    I wondered if this approach would be feasible for a distributed crawler: https://github.com/mwmbl/mwmbl#crawling

    Also, your own posting appears to be missing from the index: https://mwmbl.org/?q=mwmbl+ycombinator

    (and, yes, another vote for changing the domain name; you can have a quirky project name, but if I can't remember the cat-walking-on-keyboard domain, I'm not going to use it)

    • marc_abonce 312 days ago
      > We now have a distributed crawler that runs on our volunteers' machines! If you have Firefox you can help out by installing our extension.

      This is a very interesting idea that other search engines have tried before. Actually, the Brave search engine is built over Cliqz[6] that implemented this same idea but *without* the user's consent.

      Copy pasting from an old comment I made about this "human web" crawler idea:

      Both PeARS[1] and Cliqz[2] tried to do that. Both got direct support from Mozilla[3][4] but it looks like neither really kicked off.

      PeARS was meant to be installed voluntarily by users who would then choose to share their indexes only to those they personally trusted, so the idea is very privacy conscious but also very hard to scale.

      Cliqz, on the other hand, apparently tried to work around that issue by having their add-on bundled by default in some Firefox installations[5] which was obviously very controversial because of its privacy and user consent implications.

      I still think the idea has potential, though, even if it's in a more limited scope.

      [1] https://github.com/PeARSearch/PeARS-orchard

      [2] https://cliqz.com/en/whycliqz/human-web

      [3] https://blog.mozilla.org/press-uk/2016/06/22/mozilla-gives-3...

      [4] https://blog.mozilla.org/press-uk/2016/08/23/mozilla-makes-s...

      [5] https://www.zdnet.com/article/firefox-tests-cliqz-engine-whi...

      [6] https://www.theregister.com/2021/03/03/brave_buys_a_search_e...

      • daoudc 311 days ago
        Thanks, I didn't know this history! We don't use any user data when crawling, just bandwidth and compute. We tell the extension what to crawl.
      • Proven 311 days ago
        [dead]
    • robinduckett 311 days ago
      I’m from Wales and it almost seems like a transliteration of the word “Mumble” - actual translation is “mwmial”
      • dmurray 311 days ago
        Welsh has the unfortunate combination of being unfamiliar to most English speakers, and not exotic enough to score diversity points.
        • melx 311 days ago
          On that topic I love the Welsh-English encounter of civil servants thinking they understood each other[0]

          [0] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7702913.stm

          • mdaniel 311 days ago
            Heh, I look forward to the future version of "en tant que modèle linguistique, je ne peux pas traduire ce texte" or in this specific case "fel model iaith, ni allaf gyfieithu'r testun hwnnw"
          • zx8080 311 days ago
            It surprisingly resembles Swedish language a bit.
      • toastal 311 days ago
        But Mumble brings back fond memories https://www.mumble.info/
      • remram 311 days ago
        So not only is it based on an obscure word in Welsh, but it's not even spelled correctly?
      • daoudc 311 days ago
        Yeah, pretty much, I named it after Mumbles or Mwmbwls where I live, but it's also a play on the word mumble.
    • eviks 312 days ago
      You don't need to remember it, just bookmark and tag however you like (it's anyway a waste of keystrokes to manual type the full domain for such a frequently used site like a search engine)
      • DandyDev 311 days ago
        That is not how a large part of the citizens on the internet works. Hell, a not insignificant number of people will still "search" for Google in their address bar before they get to the actual googling
        • eviks 311 days ago
          Except I'm not talking to a large part of the citizens, but to a single one. Do you type 'google.com' in your address bar to search?
          • tux1968 311 days ago
            You're being argumentative for no good reason. He was suggesting a name change to improve the likelihood of a large userbase, not a change for his own convenience.
      • Brian_K_White 311 days ago
        This is 100% wrong.

        One's normal phone and laptop is actually only a fraction of uses, and even one's normal device isn't just one thing that needs to be done one time in grade school and then set for life. It's a dozen different things, and they are all perpetually rotating, and most people are not highly optimized with profiles they actually export and import.

        This idea is great but it's going absolutely nowhere without a better understanding of actual humans.

        • eviks 311 days ago
          Name at least half of those perpetually rotating things and quantify "only a fraction"

          I'm an actual human, I use alternative search engines, I don't memorize their full names, and the only thing perpertually rotating is the planet

          • Brian_K_White 311 days ago
            A stack of old laptops since they are too good to throw away since I buy good stuff and am a Linux user, so even my 10 year old machines are actually still great. So I use them for vacation to take a clean wiped machine, for things like attaching to a 3d printer or being a part of my electronics workbench or out in the garage. Old android tablets and phones which get used about the same way, vacation, device interface. Not to mention, a smaller but similar collection belonging to my wife. These are just the things I might search in a web browser on.

            There are actually browsers also built in to 4 TVs, also in the rokus and google TVs attached to those same TVs, also in the Xbox and ps3. But I won't even count any of those. I have actually used them, but I'll give you those for free since I don't actually use those browsers very much.

            Also that just reminded me that all of the old devices are fairly regularly getting reinstalled with some new version of a linux or bsd distro fresh every time I pick one back up, so, no configured profiles.

            The windows partition on my main machine is frequently reinstalled since I experiment with trying to use either a partition or Frameworks custom usbc module or a regular usbc external drive, or just a partition on a bigger faster external drive. That's one physical device but a few different OS's, and most of those OS's besides my main daily driver get moved around and reinstalled a lot so they are always new and unconfigured., yet, I still need to use them, and that means I use a browser to search from within them.

            My kobo, and 3 or so other eink readers. Which, again, occasionally gets reinstalled, so even the one device needs to be set up more than once.

            The only reason I don't have to set up a new phone every 6 months is because I value a headphone jack more than most everyone else. So if you would say my usage pattern is an outlier, I would say, 1 so what? Outliers exist and could even be argued to outnumber the center peak of the bell curve, and 2 some of my outlier usage pattern goes the opposite way, like using the same phone for 5 years.

            And then of course I use many machines which are not mine. And this is not even counting that my work used to involve some amount of user it support where I would use a users desk or a hot desk at a customer site, I just mean my own personal normal activity is on many other machines besides my own, including relatives, friends, & public machines.

            I had to type "google" (back when I used google primarily, and it wasn't already everyone's default) countless times, even though it was the home page on my own main machine.

            This question didn't really even deserve the dignity of any answer it is so obtuse.

            • eviks 311 days ago
              The only rotating thing in this story is the person actively wasting time erasing all the traces of history without any easily available sync that would prevent the need to type "google" countless times.

              But even then compared to that effort remembering a new word is trivial

              > So if you would say my usage pattern is an outlier, I would say, 1 so what?

              I'd say it's not relevant to this conversation where you barge in with an uber-confident "100% wrong" when it's only "1 person" wrong

  • dang 312 days ago
    Related:

    Show HN: I'm building a non-profit search engine - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29690877 - Dec 2021 (199 comments)

  • evolve2k 312 days ago
    Love that you folks are working on this. We desperately need more diversity in search options.

    Much is at stake in this arena.

    • marginalia_nu 312 days ago
      I'd love to see more competition in search. Feels like everyone right now gets tripped up on trying to emulate Google, which is a trap even if you succeed. Nobody is going to out-Google Google.

      ChatGPT's recent huge success in performing a specific tasks previously within the domain of Google by doing something other than they are is a good example of this.

      • kristopolous 311 days ago
        Chatgpt is so much more useful for things that are specific and complex than Google is.

        Google used to be good at it but it's now utterly befuddled by specificity and returns such garbage that I had given up.

        But the form of "I'm doing this, I'm seeing this and I'm wondering if X is possible" chatgpt is solid on that - basically a personal stack overflow

        • marginalia_nu 311 days ago
          Question-answering is something Google pivoted toward with great enthusiasm but never quite nailed down. They'd sometimes get some questions right, but it was more of a broken clock sort of a deal.
          • kristopolous 311 days ago
            Most implementations of this have a race towards generalities.

            The biggest problem used to be when seemingly the whole internet was satisfied with an answer that is extremely wrong and broken when you do it.

            Chatgpt can work though this without getting into a weird markov cycle maybe half the time which is great.

            Patterns like "Hey I tried that. It still doesn't work, can you give me another option"

            • marginalia_nu 311 days ago
              ChatGPT has other failure modes. When a question doesn't have an answer written down somewhere, it really struggles. A case is something like "how do I write a parquet file in Java without using Hadoop".

              This not at all trivial but quite possible[1], but ChatGPT will in 100% of the time either hallucinate APIs, disregard the instructions to not use Hadoop or give otherwise plausible but incorrect-looking answers.

              The trick is that it isn't doable by simply finding the correct dependencies and API calls, you need extract and override filesystem classes from the Hadoop project to cut those ties.

              [1] https://github.com/strategicblue/parquet-floor

              • kristopolous 311 days ago
                You can call it out "hey you just made that up. Think hard and give me a real answer"

                I don't know if "think hard" does anything but it seems to work and if I was the one making chatgpt I'd certainly have configurable keywords like that to tweak the generation settings - mostly so I could skate by on cheaper queries 90+% of the time and then have a fix when they fail

        • Fnoord 311 days ago
          Google got completely and utterly raped by world-wide SEO. We'll have to see how ChatGPT ages. Since the dataset is more controlled, I give it a fair chance.
          • marginalia_nu 311 days ago
            Google's problem is with the conflict of interest inherent in their business model. It prevents them from doing what they need to do in order to decisively tackle the search engine spam problem they're struggling with.

            It would be very easy to improve Google's search result quality by removing their promoted results, and then penalizing websites with ads and adtech.

            • kristopolous 311 days ago
              That's only half of it. It's a question of fidelity. If I am genuinely interested in reading about the latest celebrity gossip or a local crime story, ad tech sites with videos and irritating things flying across the screen is actually what I'm looking for.

              I strongly believe the smartest interfaces have the right fidelity to empower the user to effectively control the tool.

              These parameters need to have the right dimensionality, faceting and perimeters to be expressive in this way.

              I know you've got your own semi famous search engine and I express these ideas with that known

    • daoudc 311 days ago
      Thank you! Join us if you like, there is plenty of work to do.
    • Proven 312 days ago
      [dead]
  • krishadi 311 days ago
    This and the other engines seem to implement all the components of crawling, indexing, and searching strung together. Is there a reason for this? Wouldn't an option of, let's say, crawling + indexing made available separately, where others could built a search algorithm on top of, or just the crawling as a service made available. Are there stuff like these already available? Or is it just not a viable option?
    • marginalia_nu 311 days ago
      Crawling can be done collaboratively, but there's not a lot of point to doing this. Crawling is the cheap and easy part.

      As for the rest, in order to perform well, the indexer needs to be built specifically tailored to the what the search engine is doing. Often you're scrounging for places to cram in individual bits to encode some additional piece of information about the term.

      If a DBMS tries to support every use case, a search engine index does the opposite, it supports a singular use case and cuts every corner imaginable and then some to make that happen with as much resource frugality as possible.

      • daoudc 311 days ago
        Thanks, Marginalia search was a big inspiration for this project!
    • ddorian43 311 days ago
      There is common crawl: https://github.com/commoncrawl
      • marginalia_nu 311 days ago
        Kinda sucks that it's stuck in AWS with no easy way of exfiltrating the data from the Amazon ecosystem. Last I tried I got like 100 Kb/s on their HTTP mirror. At that rate, the download would take 12 years.
        • ddorian43 311 days ago
          I just tried 2 http examples from https://commoncrawl.org/get-started for an old dataset and the most recent one and got 110Mb/s (my full download bandwidth):

            wget https://data.commoncrawl.org/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2018-17/segments/1524125937193.1/warc/CC-MAIN-20180420081400-20180420101400-00000.warc.gz
          
            wget https://data.commoncrawl.org/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-23/segments/1685224643388.45/warc/CC-MAIN-20230527223515-20230528013515-00483.warc.gz
  • kwhitefoot 311 days ago
    A lot of the terms I searched for returned no hits. The Firefox add-on crawls pages linked from Hacker News which is amusing perhaps but seems unlikely to crawl a representative selection of the web. Perhaps the user should be able to suggest pages to be crawled.

    But when it does find something it is very quick! So I'll give it a go.

    • hk__2 311 days ago
      Same experience: it’s quick at finding irrelevant links. For some reason, it seems to have indexed a lot of spammy websites: search for "Trastevere" on Google, and you get Wikipedia and pages about the district in Rome. Search it on Mwmbl and you only get links from a random *.it-romehotels.com website.

      Other random examples: search for "2023" and the very first link is "2023 Pomeroy College Basketball Ratings". Search for "iphone", and the 5th link is a page about iPhone 6s that was last updated in 2021. Typos don't work: "haker news" has only one result, a hungarian press article.

  • Black616Angel 312 days ago
    Okay, name aside, because I instantly got that and englisch isn't my first language.

    But the crawler seems to be lacking quite a bit. For my first search (current work problem) "rust json diff" it only found 6 links, only one of which was a rust crate. Unfortunate.

    Second Search: "black sabbath sleeping village lyrics" only gave 2 results, only one of which was correct.

    Also the repo is missing the SearXNG[1] search engine.

    [1] https://github.com/searxng/searxng

    • marginalia_nu 312 days ago
      SearXNG isn't really a search engine. It's just a unified front-end for other search engines, doesn't do any actual crawling or indexing as far as I'm aware.
  • carlsborg 311 days ago
    Sub-100 ms search results, nicely typed python codebase, good project. How many 4096 byte pages do you currently store?
  • illegally 311 days ago
    For fun and learning is good but don't think it's practical... not even close to functionality from search engines in the 90s
    • daoudc 311 days ago
      The more people that join, and help us crawl, the better it gets.
  • TheExplorer 311 days ago
    Typing 'Debian' and getting some results, adding 'gdm' results 0. lol
  • Fnoord 311 days ago
    When I enter Kamil Galeev I get directed to a Nitter post by him (and only that), but when I enter Kamil Kazani (which was the mentioned nickname of said Nitter post) I get returned nothing at all.
    • daoudc 308 days ago
      That seems to be because it's written kamilkazani, and automatically splitting such names is a hard problem
  • BlackLotus89 311 days ago
    Gigablast (linked in the faq) is dead for some time now. Had some sort of collab with freenode and then suddenly disappeared (not implying causality)
  • Reticularas 311 days ago
    Don't know if the index isn't complete, but the results with this are quite poor
  • marginalia_nu 312 days ago
    I was happy to notice these guys a while back, but the git repo seems very dormant. I wonder if they backpedaled on the open source side of things, or if the project is asleep.

    Either would be sad, because the world needs more open source search engines.

    • daoudc 311 days ago
      Yes, I took a break for a while, my fourth child was just born! Still committed to the project though and working on it when I get time.

      Thanks for your encouragement. Would love to have a chat some time.

      • marginalia_nu 311 days ago
        Feel free to shoot me an email, I love to talk search engines :D
  • nonrandomstring 311 days ago
    > This website requires you to support/enable scripts.

    Bye bye.

    You do not need "scripts" to turn the text string I'll supply into a list of candidate links. How can you not understand this basic accessibility foundation?

    • daoudc 311 days ago
      The API is open so feel free to write your own front end that doesn't need js, or send a PR to add support for no js.
  • daoudc 311 days ago
    Hi, creator here, happy to see this posted! Feel free to ask any questions.
  • luc_rnz 311 days ago
    Thank you for sharing this, this is very interesting. I will give it a try, although I don't think it can replace my current engine (DuckDuckGo/Searx), but rahter complement it maybe (by having a smaller, more curated set of data).

    Particularly I am having a great time reading the crawler extension source-code: https://github.com/mwmbl/crawler-extension

  • 1vuio0pswjnm7 311 days ago
    "Welcome to mwmbl, the free, open-source and non-profit search engine.

    This website requires you to support/enable scripts."

    JSON results, no Javascript

    https://api.mwmbl.org/?search=search+the+web+without+javascr...

  • rstreefland 309 days ago
    I was intrigued by the name and was very pleasantly surprised to confirm the Welsh influence when I clicked though. The creator lives very close to home for me.

    Dal ati! We really need open source alternatives to Google.

  • davidebaldini 311 days ago
    If I understand, having only 4096 bytes of data per term causes multiple terms in the same query to intersect to little or no results. The purpose seems to cut cost in compromise of completeness.
    • marginalia_nu 311 days ago
      Yeah. That seems like a design decision that will scale poorly. For reference, even in my dinky 100M index I have individual terms with several gigabytes of associated document references.

      In general hash map table index designs don't tend to be very efficient. If you use a skip list or something similar, you can calculate the intersection between sets in sublinear time.

      • daoudc 311 days ago
        We actually just take the union and then re-rank. Because the lists are all small, this is cheap.
    • daoudc 311 days ago
      Yes, you're correct on the purpose. We mitigate it a little by also indexing on bigrams.
  • IYasha 310 days ago
    White screen, no content, 30 errors in the console. Firefox 50.1 @Ubuntu Too much JS for one page... :-|
  • starstripe 311 days ago
    Searched "Littler Books" and nothing came up. Would be awesome if this worked as expected.
    • daoudc 311 days ago
      It's easy to crawl specific sites using the command line crawler
  • evolve2k 312 days ago
    UI feedback: On my iPhone the search box shows two magnifine glasses, make it just one.
    • retrofuturism 311 days ago
      Google only has 1. You gotta 1-up the competition to win.
  • crtasm 311 days ago
    It's much easier to read after changing --bold-font-weight to 500 in the CSS.
  • tamimio 311 days ago
    I searched first test “best business banks in Canada” and it showed no results saying it couldn’t find any “We could not find anything for your search..”, I can also see two redundant lenses icons.
    • marginalia_nu 311 days ago
      What sort of result would you expect for such a query?
      • tamimio 311 days ago
        Primarily a list of options to choose from, preferably that from a non-affiliated site, asking the same in GPT-4 I get the following:

        >Tangerine Business Savings Account: This account offers a high interest rate of 2.65% to 3.25% on your balance, no monthly fees, no minimum balance requirement, unlimited transactions, free e-transfers, and access to over 3,000 ATMs.

        >Wise Business Account: This account offers low-cost international payments in over 50 currencies, no monthly fees, no minimum balance requirement, free local transfers, free debit card, and access to over 10 million ATMs.

        >BMO eBusiness Plan: This account offers no monthly fees, no minimum balance requirement, unlimited transactions, free e-transfers, free cheque deposits, and access to over 3,500 ATMs.

        >RBC Digital Choice Business Account: This account offers no monthly fees for the first three months ($5 per month thereafter), unlimited electronic transactions, 10 free debit transactions per month ($1.25 each thereafter), free e-transfers, free cheque deposits, and access to over 4,200 ATMs.

        • marginalia_nu 311 days ago
          Well if we imagine a search engine as a document retrieval machine, who would publish such a document?
          • tamimio 311 days ago
            > who would publish such a document?

            The banks? In this case. Because if you do the manual searching, you will “manually” go to each bank site, go to accounts, business section and read, a good search engine will do that for me, no middle man (aka some 3rd party sites) and summarize it based on my query, a bad search engine however, will look into a 3rd party website that already created a list, recommended some based on affiliate links, boosted itself in the results by playing the SEO keywords game.

          • Brian_K_White 311 days ago
            Before I kagi this (not even google, just kagi!) shall we wager on whether there is or is not at least one, likely several such documents? Come on.
  • joshxyz 311 days ago
    man these names are making me dyslexic. love it though.
  • 38 312 days ago
    slashes get eaten by the page. not cool.
    • dotcoma 312 days ago
      So do vowels ;)
  • imachine1980_ 312 days ago
    still don't understand ""
  • romwell 312 days ago
    OK, the obvious question:

    Why go with an unpronounceable name?

    I mean, great that it was made, but I can't even tell people I'm using... mwumble? But it's spelled em-doubleyou-em-bee-el dot org.

    • BLKNSLVR 312 days ago
      It's pronounced mumble. An explanation is at the very bottom of the github Readme, quoting:

      > How do you pronounce "mwmbl"?

      > Like "mumble". I live in Mumbles, which is spelt "Mwmbwls" in Welsh. But the intended meaning is "to mumble", as in "don't search, just mwmbl!"

      • xpe 312 days ago
        Ok, I'll think of it like this. Since the name of "w" is "double u" that means "mwmbl" is also "muumbl"!

        UUho knows, maybe the name can uuork after all!

      • 9dev 311 days ago
        Marketing 101: don’t try to be clever with your brand name :)
        • xpe 310 days ago
          Philosophy 101: Think deeply. Use reasoning. Things depend on other things.

          The marketing claim above is so far from universal truth. Choosing a "clever" versus a straightforward brand name often depends on the brand strategy, target audience, and market conditions.

          But, sorry, for this example, I personally think the current brand name is atrocious.

      • romwell 310 days ago
        >I live in Mumbles, which is spelt "Mwmbwls" in Welsh.

        Ah Welsh, the golden standard of phonetic spelling and easy pronunciation!

        In other words, one needs a manual just to learn how to pronounce the name of that thing.

        Off to a great start, aren't we?

        >An explanation is at the very bottom of the github Readme

        AKA the first place anyone visiting the website would look at. NOT.

        Did writing "pronounced Mumble" on the landing page hurt puppies or something?

        >"don't search, just mumble!"

        I think half of the country is already doing that when it comes to fact-checking, and they certainly don't need a search engine for that.

        And here I was thinking GIMP was a horrible name.

      • sdf4j 312 days ago
        really? like mumble? [0]

        [0] https://mumble.info

        • BLKNSLVR 312 days ago
          According to government records, the only names not yet trademarked are "Popplers" and "Zittzers"
          • lionkor 311 days ago
            Not for long! Someone ought to make a Popplers fastfood chain.
      • Brian_K_White 311 days ago
        It's pronounced "google mumble".
    • dabluecaboose 312 days ago
      Its a tech startup, vowels are not chic
    • evolve2k 312 days ago
      +1000 change the name

      Make it so you can use it in a sentence to replace “Just google it”

    • Brian_K_White 311 days ago
      They are begging to be either ignored or forked.

      There are no other outcomes if they don't already understand why everyone is telling them this is unusable.

    • thelastparadise 312 days ago
      I think it's mimblewimble.
      • kylecazar 312 days ago
        That's worse than I thought, suspected it was a play on mumble.
  • Andrew018 311 days ago
    [dead]
  • based-nerd 312 days ago
    [flagged]
  • bobse 312 days ago
    What a terrible name! Into the trash.
    • jw_cook 312 days ago
      While it doesn't refute your point, the Frequently Asked Question section does give an explanation for the consonant soup: it's Welsh.

      > How do you pronounce "mwmbl"? Like "mumble". I live in Mumbles, which is spelt "Mwmbwls" in Welsh. But the intended meaning is "to mumble", as in "don't search, just mwmbl!"

      • seanthemon 312 days ago
        I highly recommend grabbing something simpler to say and remember to redirect to your site. You're going to need a large amoung of inertia to get people to comfortably use an odd domain name.
        • AlphaCerium 311 days ago
          Arguably, Google was probably a odd name for a search engine to people in the 90s that weren't maths-savvy.
          • brettermeier 311 days ago
            But it's a normal word, unlike "mwmbl" (I had to look it up, couldn't remember where the "b" and "w" goes after some seconds).
            • arghwhat 311 days ago
              No it's not, it is an intentional misspelling of "googol" and means nothing - not in English or any other language. "Spotify" is also not a "normal word" in any language. And for those not native in English (there's supposedly only some 400 million of those), it's just a random sound sequence like any other.

              mwmbl is a shortening of the welsh writing of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mumbles. Only tricky part is knowing that the w is pronounced as a u. Maybe it would be slightly easier if one followed the fad of leaving out vowels, but guessing a vowel and having a tricky vowel does not seem much different.

              • marginalia_nu 311 days ago
                > Only tricky part is knowing that the w is pronounced as a u

                Is that really tricky? W is basically pronounced like U in English already[1]. It just looks funny when you exchange the two.

                [1] e.g. say this sentence "uorld uar tuo uas the uorst"

                • arghwhat 311 days ago
                  In many other languages, w is pronounced like a v and in some cases even named "double vee".

                  > e.g. say this sentence "uorld uar tuo uas the uorst"

                  This doesn't work with the English pronunciations of the letter u from words like "uninteresting" or "mumble". It mostly seems to work with the pronunciation of "you", which does not naturally fit those letter placements.

                  Not knowing the proper linguistic terms, I'd consider "w" to be a modulation of a another sounding vowel by closing your lips and pressing your tongue a bit down to make room. Without a vowel to modulate, there is no sound, and so "mwmbl" is a bit of a question mark.

                  But most words require prior knowledge to pronounce correctly, especially in as messy a language as English.

              • brettermeier 311 days ago
                Oh thanks for clarification.
            • marginalia_nu 311 days ago
              It's a normal word now. In 1998, it was pretty weird. How many o:s does it have, is it -el or -le? etc.
    • kiririn 311 days ago
      It’s a fine name but at first glance conflicts with Mumble (VoIP) and Mimblewimble (Crypto)
  • mdtrooper 312 days ago
    I remember https://yacy.net/ but the big problem of this project was java and had not implementations in others languages. I mean it as imagine torrent was only in perl.
    • marginalia_nu 312 days ago
      YaCy's big problem is that distributed search is a bad idea that will never perform well. Search is as fast as the data is local.
      • kristopolous 312 days ago
        There was an effort in the early 90s to have search as a protocol so you could have a query and then select the domains you want to run it on and return an aggregate result.

        It was 100% abandoned and I think that's a mistake. It'd be nice to explore some of those ideas again

        • marginalia_nu 311 days ago
          I think a big part of the problem is that domains in isolation don't provide the best search results. Out-of-band information like (global) anchor texts or click data makes search perform so much better.

          If I want to learn how to do an INNER JOIN in MariaDB, this is the authoritative source: https://mariadb.com/kb/en/join-syntax/

          The problem being that INNER JOIN isn't particularly important to that page using most IR measures of importance, it's also primarily in a <code>-block which is typically further de-prioritized. To learn that this is an important link, you need to look outside of mariadb.com.

          • kristopolous 311 days ago
            There's more to it than that.

            What if instead of crawling the php generation of database rows with a bunch of cruft, the administrator published some kind of schema with scraping and querying rules and you could alternatively make a single call to capture all of the data in a sematic schema.

            You can still do all the stuff you're talking about but it could make search more coherent.

            An entry for that humans and an entry for the computers.

            You can't trust everybody like this sure, but say imdb, discogs, wikipedia, all of which provide database dumps anyways (eg: https://datasets.imdbws.com/). That's what I'm advocating for revisiting. Lots of legit sites such as universities, newspapers, public records offices...

            You could even have a search toggle "screened sources" or whatever for the ones that make the cut

            • teddyh 311 days ago
              Wasn’t this what the Semantic Web was supposed to enable?
              • kristopolous 311 days ago
                That was more an ontological web. That's a different project which I totally support but this time through ML
                • teddyh 307 days ago
                  Then, DBpedia might be more like what you’re after?
        • teddyh 311 days ago