Babelia
Search engine and crawler in Scheme
Babelia is a privacy friendly, decentralized, open source, and accessible search engine. Search has been an essential part of knowledge acquisition from the dawn of time, whether it is antique lexicographically ordered filing cabinets or nowadays computer-based wonders such as Google or Bing. From casual search to help achieve common tasks such as cooking, keeping up with the news, a regular dose of cat memes or professional search such as science research. Search is, and will remain, an essential daily-use tool, and steers human progress forward.
Babelia aims to replace the use of privateer search engines with a search engine that is open, hence under the control of the commons. Babelia wants to be an easy to install, easy to use, easy to maintain, no-code, personal search engine that can scale to billions of documents, beyond a terabyte of text data, for under €100 a month per Babelia instance.
- The project's own website: https://babelia.one
Why does this actually matter to end users?
Search and discovery is one of the most important and essential use cases of the internet. When you are in school and need to give a presentation, when you are looking for a job, trying to promote your business or finding relevant commercial or public services you need, most of the time you will turn to the internet and more importantly the search bar in your browser to find answers. Searching information and making sure your name, company or idea can be discovered is crucial for users, but they actually have little control over this. Search engines set the terms for what results you see, how your website can be discovered and what information is logged about your searches. What terms are set remains obscure for users and they can only follow the rules laid out for them, instead of deciding on their own what, where and how to find the information they are looking for.
More transparent, customizable and privacy-friendly search puts the user in the driver seat and can provide them with more meaningful results. Babelia is an effort to create a personal search engine: a place you can go to search through large bodies of text and data. And if you are looking for specific knowledge, you would also be able to find another instance of Babelia that might be able to answer your questions. This way search and discovery becomes a personal and community-driven trajectory, instead of a commercial one.
This project was funded through the NGI0 Discovery Fund, a fund established by NLnet with financial support from the European Commission's Next Generation Internet programme, under the aegis of DG Communications Networks, Content and Technology under grant agreement No 825322.
