The fog of war and the small-net's search engines
=================================================
The more I browse a small-net, the more I'm suffering from a lack of
reliable search engines. We have several projects, which are aiming to
build a search engine that could be the same as their big-net
relatives. The truth is that they are not working too well. During the
writing of this paragraph, I tried to search Gopher Lawn and Medusae
Gemini Directory with them, and I failed. So the common result of
current search engines is many entries in, what seems to be, random
order. We are at the beginning of the path. It's worth saying that
during gathering answers about how Gophersphere was in the 90s' one of
the common answers was the problem with slow search engines!
When I am getting unsatisfactory results I start to think about a
better form of a query string. Maybe that search engines are good, but
it's some lack of my skill causing lots of random entries. But
probably they don't, and it's caused by too simple algorithms of the
search engines or limitation of indexed content (for eg. only titles).
We are like in the fog of war. I'm repeatably discovering the same
addresses, which I am forgetting later. The most information on what
is trendy now on the small-net I obtain on recent Gemlogs' entries,
and Blogrolls on various Capsules. On the one of the Gopherhole, I
learned by accident that /taz.de/ (it's one of the biggest newspapers)
offers its sites on small-net (Gopher and Gemini). How can such
information be found less randomly?
I'm thinking how it was about the WWW years ago. The situation was
probably the same. The first advanced algorithm was introduced in the
Altavista search engine (1995-2013). The first version of the Google
search engine was published in 1996. Of course the current situation
of the world visible on the first pages of Google is sick, and the
original PageRank algorithm now is distorted. It's supporting goals
for which searching for an ordinary user isn't a priority (more
collecting data and selling products based on that data).
I don't remember how "everything" on the WWW was settled down. I was
then an active user, and this is a forgotten part of my Internet
experience. How is it that the use of certain websites or services is
obvious? So for searching, I am doing that pattern of activities. For
checking the weather another one. For news the third one.
That knowledge of how to use the small-net isn't set up for me yet.
Search engines
--------------
-Gopher-
~ [Veronica II]:
gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/7/v2/
~ [Quarry]:
gopher://gopher.icu/7/quarry
-Gemini-
~ [Geminispace.info]:
gemini://geminispace.info/
~ [Kennedy Search Gemini space]:
gemini://kennedy.gemi.dev/
~ [TLGS]:
gemini://tlgs.one/
Indexes or catalogues
----------------------
-Gopher-
~ [Observable Gopherspace Universe Project]:
gopher://gopher.viste.fr/1/ogup
~ [Gopher Lawn]:
gopher://bitreich.org:70/1/lawn
-Gemini-
~ [Lupa]:
gemini://gemini.bortzmeyer.org/software/lupa/stats.gmi
~ [Medusae.space Gemini Directory]:
gemini://medusae.space/index.gmi
If you are aware of addresses which should be added here, contact me
by e-mail.
--
szczezuja.space CC BY-SA
@ Fri 22 Apr 2022 12:00:18 PM CEST
