PFpfraze·Dec 18, 2017
Another interesting element about the local index is that it might be usable for discovery. Essentially there's a local cache of the Web in the user's browser. Much of that local cache has semi-structured data thanks to JSON, and we've begun to take advantage of that with a secondary indexer called WebDB [1]. It's feasible to imagine an API where apps ask the browser to search for files or Dat archives which match a certain spec. For instance, "Give me all user profiles which match the following JSON schema." Since the local index is curated by the user, this will naturally hit results that have some connection to the user.
The concept is of the browser as a user agent, crawling the Web from the user's input set to find relevant data, rather than an objective "map and rank the world objectively" engine like Google does.
Other than this lo
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cal index and distributed indexes like YaCy (which are very neat but a lot of work) there's also the traditional hosted indexes. My hope is that people will be able to self-host their own indexes privately, as an extension of their subjective local index (but with a larger graph searched). However, there's still room for traditional search engines to crawl dat sites as well.
1. https://github.com/beakerbrowser/webdb