Indexathon
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On October 19th from 16:00 – 17:30 CAIS will open its doors to the public with a presentation of the results from the Indexathon, a two-day marathon experiment in ‘alternative search methods’ with 10 invited international researchers.
Screenshot of the peer ‚migratingidentities‘ within the YaCy ‚freeworld‘ p2p network
The p2p search engine YaCy forms the departure point for the Indexathon, with its open source code, privacy searching and ‘freeworld’ of thousands of peers, making it the largest distributed search engine in the world.
During the Indexathon, each researcher is asked to contribute to the public index of YaCy with their interests or research topic: legacy software, full text search, video archives, radical open access, censoring, digital libraries, code, public commons, anonymity, meta search and internet security.
The Indexathon intends to analyse YaCy’s divergent search results from mainstream search engines along with carrying out ‘comparative’ search models. Furthermore, questions about the ‘future of search’ regarding information retrieval, federated approaches to vertical search, natural language processing and search ranking criteria surrounding the notion of ‘relevancy’ will be addressed.
Screenshot of the YaCy crawler indexing the website of Institute of Network Cultures (INC), Amsterdam
What are some of the outcomes? How do YaCy results differ from other search engines? What kinds of use cases have been developed?
Yet another Cyberspace developer Michael Christen will illuminate YaCy’s latest developments in search such as susi.ai and the forthcoming YaCy Grid project.
Moreover, the potentials of the next ‘Indexathon’ or ‘Searchathon’ will be proposed and discussed.
Concept, research and organisation: CAIS fellow Renée Ridgway
Tech lead: Michael Christen (YaCy)
