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There would be at least two ways to do it, neither of which are likely realistic to something google scale. One would be to cache results, so that any search s

by basch 6y ago

There would be at least two ways to do it, neither of which are likely realistic to something google scale. One would be to cache results, so that any search searched before could be retrieved. This is limited in that you cant make new searches on old data, and possibly stores private information that shouldnt be accessible to others. The other way would be to have the index and algorithm versioned, where you can target any instance of the algorithm against any version of the data.

aspenmayer 6y ago
Your second method is more in line with what I had in my mind as what you were getting at, and is pretty much the context of my original reply. I am sure it’s technically possible going forward, but it would be interesting if such capabilities could be enabled for historical versions of the index and algorithm. Combined with anonymized historical zeitgeist data, some interesting digital archaeology could be attempted. All the more reason to run your own crawler! What’s the state of the art for this area right now in self hosted solutions? Can you version your index and algorithm like we’re discussing and do these kinds of search-data time-traveling?