What type of PeARS contributor are you?

There are many ways to contribute to a decentralised search engine, and not all of them require technical skills. You may simply be searching for information, you may be a born organiser, or you might enjoy the technical challenges of running your own mini search engine.

Discover below the searcher, the curator and the admin.

The searcher

Searchers are all of us. We constantly need information about the world, to help us in our jobs and private lives. Most of us query a search engine many times a day. At present, given the influence of Big Tech over our technological choices, we most likely use the search solutions of Google or Bing. (NB: Many alternative search engines are just an interface to the Bing API and do not provide their own search index.)

By using a decentralised solution, searchers promote the adoption of a real alternative to Web search, owned by all of us rather than by a central organisation or company. At first, PeARS will not replace the dominant solutions: the decentralised index will take a while to grow and be insufficient for many search needs. But it will still prove useful when searching for quality information on a specific topic. And over time, as curators and admins grow the network, it will slowly morph into a general-purpose search solution. So come and be part of the revolution at its very beginning. Only you can make it happen!

The curator

Curators are excellent organisers, who care about information being available and easy to find. In a world where the Web is flooded with advertisement, SEO-driven pages, AI-generated stories and factually dubious content, curators are the defenders of knowledge and we desperately need them in a decentralised search solution.

PeARS is a curated search engine. We do not aim at indexing anything and everything on the Internet, but rather focus on resources that have been vetted by actual human beings. Each instance of PeARS focuses on a topic of interest. For instance, you could have an instance on US politics, one on vegan recipes or one on Python programming. Within each instance, documents are roughly categorised within subtopics too. This taxonomy is important for the efficiency of the system and for information sharing. When someone searches for information from one PeARS instance, the system calculates in real-time which other instances might be suited to answer the query and sends the request to the most appropriate nodes. By having instances that are topically consistent, we make it more likely that this redirection will work well.

On each instance, it is possible to browse the subtopics available on that node. This is useful for people who may want to extract a URL list for a particular area of interest and e.g. index those pages on their own private PeARS installation at home.

To help curating instances, you can visit the ‘suggestion’ page of each instance and propose URLs that match the topic of the node. The node admin will review suggestions and usually accept them for inclusion into their index, making the page searchable. The more suggestions are made, the quicker the instance grows and helps the whole decentralised network to become a general-purpose search engine.

For those who are interested in using URL lists on their private installation, you can visit the ‘Categories’ page of the instance, click ‘view’ on any subtopic, and obtain the list of URLs indexed on the instance under that subtopic.

The admin

Admins keep decentralised search alive by running their own PeARS server. Imagine it as having your own mini search engine, focused on a particular topic. Searchers and curators come to your site to use your service and expand it with good indexing suggestions. You are also findable and searchable from other PeARS instances.

A PeARS admin has many roles. They will at the very least:

Install and maintain the PeARS software for an instance;
Populate the index with own material; review URLs that have been suggested by the community and index them;
Monitor content on the instance; respond to queries from third-parties (e.g. offensive content reports, take-down requests).