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Yes. Both PeARS[1] and Cliqz[2] tried to do that. Both got direct support from Mozilla[3][4] but it looks like neither really kicked off. PeARS was meant to be

Yes. Both PeARS[1] and Cliqz[2] tried to do that. Both got direct support from Mozilla[3][4] but it looks like neither really kicked off. PeARS was meant to be installed voluntarily by users who would then choose to share their indexes only to those they personally trusted, so the idea is very privacy conscious but also very hard to scale. Cliqz, on the other hand, apparently tried to work around that issue by having their add-on bundled by default in some Firefox installations[5] which was obviously very controversial because of its privacy and user consent implications. I still think the idea has potential, though, even if it's in a more limited scope. [1] https://github.com/PeARSearch/PeARS-orchard https://github.com/PeARSearch/PeARS-orchard [2] https://cliqz.com/en/whycliqz/human-web https://cliqz.com/en/whycliqz/human-web [3] https://blog.mozilla.org/press-uk/2016/06/22/mozilla-gives-385000-to-open-source-projects-as-part-of-moss-mission-partners-program/ https://blog.mozilla.org/press-uk/2016/06/22/mozilla-gives-3... [4] https://blog.mozilla.org/press-uk/2016/08/23/mozilla-makes-strategic-investment-in-cliqz-to-enable-privacy-focused-search-innovation/ https://blog.mozilla.org/press-uk/2016/08/23/mozilla-makes-s... [5] https://www.zdnet.com/article/firefox-tests-cliqz-engine-which-slurps-user-browsing-data/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/firefox-tests-cliqz-engine-whi...

flas9sd 6y ago
thanks for the pointer to PeARS, this was wholly new and I'll read into it. I was aware Mozilla had some involvement with Cliqz, but didn't really pay attention, I remembered the company became owner of the Firefox Addon Ghostery some years ago. They closed shop mid 2020, but their tech-blog 0x65.dev is still up. There are a lot of posts from last December that explain its inner workings. User-agents really do contribute their history, containing which search terms led to which pages. From this data (they named it the "human web") the search engine had a page model of which search terms led in higher frequency to the page. Related search terms were normalized. Only later did a "fetcher" really index high frequency content and consider it again in a later stage of search. Interesting bootstrap, more energy efficient maybe as it can run on less information. Sending the search and browsing history offsite needs explaining and trust. But ultimately, any centralized search engine will see the search data too. Cliqz approach was trying to piggy-back on the result sets on search terms by established search engines, the search term + choosen result combination a donation of the user. Not any less invasive then other search engines. Would I send off the whole corpus of my browsing history? this raises good questions. Thanks for the links!

flas9sd 6y ago

thanks for the pointer to PeARS, this was wholly new and I'll read into it. I was aware Mozilla had some involvement with Cliqz, but didn't really pay attention, I remembered the company became owner of the Firefox Addon Ghostery some years ago. They closed shop mid 2020, but their tech-blog 0x65.dev is still up. There are a lot of posts from last December that explain its inner workings. User-agents really do contribute their history, containing which search terms led to which pages. From this data (they named it the "human web") the search engine had a page model of which search terms led in higher frequency to the page. Related search terms were normalized. Only later did a "fetcher" really index high frequency content and consider it again in a later stage of search. Interesting bootstrap, more energy efficient maybe as it can run on less information. Sending the search and browsing history offsite needs explaining and trust. But ultimately, any centralized search engine will see the search data too. Cliqz approach was trying to piggy-back on the result sets on search terms by established search engines, the search term + choosen result combination a donation of the user. Not any less invasive then other search engines. Would I send off the whole corpus of my browsing history? this raises good questions. Thanks for the links!