Taws 0.0.2 beta
Taws is an attempt for a personal and anonymous web search engine. When a user tries to search using an engine( google ), that user should know for a fact that no data is being stored remotely without their consent. This is what Taws tries to fix, but it has a big challenge ahead.
Basicly Taws is a search engine that you will own. You can put it on one main computer and that will supply service to all of your devices. You'll also need the crawler database(search) that is done by Genaside(me).
Go here for How-to guides and other information.
Go here to try out Taws on my server( I do my tests there, so version might be different )
Here are some other perks
- No ads, no ads, did I mention no ads?
- It's open source and you know what that means.
- You can have any type of database you want. For example, you can have an english only with no porn. You can have a japanese only search database, It's up to you.
- There is now an option to run a post query. After each update, you can better tune the database before indexing
- If you load the search database, that's it. You can even do your seaching offline, becuase the actual searching doesn't use the internet. However, you may need to go online to visit the links of search results.
- You can do "needle in haystack".
- I don't crawl hidden networks, but i'll link to anyone that does. There can be other sources to get the database besides just me.
- You can now update your database from a local file.
- I added searching for files like pdfs, I also added rss search.
- The community can control what the sites the crawler scans and what infomation to get.(good or bad thing?).
Some downsides
- No storage for images or videos, meaning there is no section for image searching.( still wondering about this )
- Database can get very big for for you. 4gb is what I think it should get for a great english database. besides, some games are this size anyways.
- If a url becomes unvisted for a while by the crawler, the url will get removed. This affects future downloads. This is a way to keep database small and relevent.
- If ubm( the pairing of user query to reselt ) doesn't get match often the ubm entry will be removed. This affects future downloads
- To save space and time, title and description have up to 255 charatere each. This means you can't search a phrase in a book
- Words that are in the stopword file can't be searched
Some notes for the user
- This is just a beta or think of it as a little baby that has a lot to learn, so it can grow up being great. So please send my ideas and support.
- The Database isn't that big yet( < 4GB). I want to get the english over 3GB and the whole database over 100GB. I will need the communities help on this.
Donating
- :( will you help out a broke person trying to do this project http://www.genaside.net/donate.html
IRC
- Visit me on IRC.
- #taws on freenode