search engines Posts 📝

NB: Since writing this post, I have moved my blog search engine into IndieWeb Search. The functionality should be similar but not exactly the same. With that said, the logic below is still accurate and I hope will be interesting to you.

I recently entertained a question about why I decided to turn what was a search engine for my blog into an IndieWeb Search engine. My motive was not clear until someone shared an article with me written by jpreston.xyz. In this article, jpreston.xyz explains why they had embarked on a similar journey to build a search engine. Quoting from their article:

TL;DR: I now support searching my site using IndieWeb Search rather than my own custom search engine. You'll still be able to search my site as normal. But my search engine has moved to indieweb-search.jamesg.blog.

IndieWeb Search was intentionally designed to be open. All search result pages are structured as a microformats h-feed. This means you can use any microformats parser to read a search results page and extract information about each search result. Every search page also comes with jf2, RSS, and JSON Feed versions. You can also parse these programatically to get information about search results. Or you could even subscribe to a search page in a feed reader that supports any of the aforementioned formats.

IndieWeb Search, a search engine that indexes sites owned by IndieWeb community members and other related sites, has saved over 421,000 web documents. I maintain IndieWeb Search as a passion project. I wanted a place to search content from IndieWeb sites so that I could find articles and guides that were applicable to the community. Using the search engine, I'm able to get direct answers to niche, community-relevant queries such as how to set up webmentions with a static site or understanding what IRC is.

(Not in any way affiliated with the renowned Fun with Flags, hosted by Dr. Sheldon Cooper.)