You folks asked for feedback when I shut this down, so I’m giving feedback.
I was super intrigued when I saw this on wikipedia’s list of search engines. I think the project is a really good idea, but there are things I would want to see change before I give it another try.
- I would massively prefer if it was a snap app.
- The user interface, especially for crawling, is too much detail for a casual user.
- I would like crawling to be more distributed, so that I could set it to crawl some pages on behalf of another user’s queue. for two reasons
- I have no idea what’s missing in the shared network. Are we all crawling the same sites? A shared queue would enable me to be helpful without accidentally DDOSing wikipedia or whatever.
- It would be less personal risk if the crawl was distributed. I told it to crawl jstor and then jstor said I was sending it suspicious traffic. I don’t want to get banned from the sites I’m crawling.
- It would be nice if this has some sort of browser integration, so browsing the web also indexed it. I would feel a lot less nervous about poking around websites that are essential to my workflow, if this was somehow organic.
- That “Support GPT” link at the top of your project’s web page is massively offputting and is a gigantic red flag.
If this ran in a gui and had an “easy / i just want to help (and search)” mode, that would go a long way.
Again, your interface asked me for feedback, which I am giving because this project seems like it has a lot of promise and I’d like to help. I will not see or respond to any replies to this message, but I’d like to wish the best of luck to this project.