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I developed a platform to navigate with slow or unstable connections (blaze.cyclic.app)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Recently, I ran out of mobile data on my phone, and I was forced to browse at a significantly reduced speed. It was so slow that it was practically unusable, except for messaging apps. So, I developed a platform in the form of a search engine that allows browsing and accessing information while exchanging a negligible amount of data. This way, even with very slow or unstable connections, it became possible to search something on Google and read content. It can be useful as an emergency search engine. However, I must mention that the project is still in the proof-of-concept stage and has many bugs. Nonetheless, it has already enabled me to browse and search for information several times. I would be curious to hear your feedback, and I would be glad if it proves useful to someone other than myself! Additionally, it's worth mentioning that the visited pages are also accessible offline.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Such a cool project :D

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Very interesting! Thank you for sharing your project!!

However, in terms of some of the benefits you mention in the "motivations", bandwidth, energy efficiency and CO2 might weak points: after all your server (backend) stays on 24/7 and it does all the heavy lifting anyway, doesn't it? So you are not really saving bandwidth/energy/CO2... (unless - of course - you cache in "time" and "space" and reuse the search results for queries of yours and of other users).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Yes, I didn't research this extensively... it was more of a hunch. :D Yes, certainly, I simply thought that if you minimize phone usage, it would result in a longer battery life and fewer charging cycles, which in turn would reduce CO2 emissions... but I admit it's a bit of a stretch. :D

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

In a similar spirit, there used to be an app called SMSmart that can proxy your phone's internet connection through a vpn tunnel over... SMS! So if you don't have any internet connection but has unlimited sms plan, you could still access the internet, slowly. I bet your webapp would pair very well with this.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Cool project! I'm always on the lookout for more search services. It works without Javascript, which is great! It's very clean and focused.

The Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) for Google are embarrassingly large. Here's a comparison from Kagi: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-speed.html

It's a little surprising that Duckduckgo's SERPs are even bigger...

I know of a few others that fit this use case, if anyone's interested.

Kagi's interface works entirely without Javascript and is a meta-search engine with results from Google, Bing, and its own indexes, and I think it has some of the best results (paid search though).

Mojeek is another search engine which uses its own index and is accessible without Javascript.

Another cool, fast search engine with its own index (though smaller) is Marginalia: https://search.marginalia.nu/

This one is free software, and you can view the sources here: https://git.marginalia.nu/marginalia/marginalia.nu

And there's also Searx, which is a fairly lightweight (but nowhere near as much as Blaze is) metasearch engine released as free software: https://github.com/searxng/searxng