Building a Search Engine from Scratch (0x65.dev)

Article summary

The article discusses the challenges of building a search engine from scratch, including the massive infrastructure costs and engineering efforts required to crawl and index the web. Cliqz, a search engine company, is attempting to overcome these challenges by using a unique approach that involves building a model of web pages based on queries only. This approach allows them to build a search engine with dramatically less resources compared to their competitors. The company's search engine uses a combination of keyword and vector-based matching techniques to retrieve relevant pages.

Main themes

• search engine development
• query-based modeling
• web indexing
• competition with Google
• privacy-focused search

What commenters say

• Using query logs to build a search engine is a viable approach, but it may raise intellectual property concerns.
• Building a search engine from scratch is extremely challenging, and it may be impossible to compete with Google's vast resources and data.
• Alternative search engines can still be successful even if they are not better than Google, as long as they offer good enough results and provide competition to the monopoly.
• The use of knowledge graphs and semantic matching can improve search results, but it also introduces noise and requires careful tuning.
• Some search engines, like DuckDuckGo, are not truly independent and rely on other search engines' results, which may limit their competitiveness.
• A search API and programmatic access can open up the problem to a world of third-party developers and improve the search engine's capabilities.
• The quality of search results is not the only factor in a search engine's success, and other features like autocomplete and suggested corrections can be just as important.
• The definition of a search engine is not limited to crawling and indexing the web, and other approaches, like proxying results from other search engines, can still be considered a search engine.