Stract: Open Source Search Engine With Its Own Crawler and "Optics"
Posted: Wed Jan 17, 2024 4:57 am
Stract is an open source and non-commercial search engine with its own crawler and independent index. I was inspired to share it by Search Engine Experiment.
Stract Home
Git Repository
While Stract is promising for being both open source and having its own independent index, what makes it relevant to the search engine experiment is its support for "Optics" -- similar to Brave Search's lenses. You can follow its syntax guide to write your own optic and make it public, and there are a number of public optics to try including one for IndieWeb sites and blogs shared on Hacker News. If you enable JavaScript in regular searches (not required), you can use a GUI next to search results to boost, downrank, or discard results from specific domains and export your current list as an optic.
I have been playing around with Stract a bit and it is impressive for what it is in its early stages. It is a serviceable generalist search engine for limited purposes. At this stage, it does not match Marginalia in its independent/old site index (e.g., my site is partially indexed in Stract but just about fully indexed by Marginalia and everything else; I do not think the Yukinu Blog is in Stract yet but there are a few Lainchan webring sites). I agree with Yukinu's search engine experiment take-away of preferring site-specific searches (e.g., I use shortcuts for Arch Wiki, VNDB, and many other sites), but Stract is not too far off from having a good enough index to be molded into a sort of combination of Marginalia + useful resources for specific use-cases.
Stract Home
Git Repository
While Stract is promising for being both open source and having its own independent index, what makes it relevant to the search engine experiment is its support for "Optics" -- similar to Brave Search's lenses. You can follow its syntax guide to write your own optic and make it public, and there are a number of public optics to try including one for IndieWeb sites and blogs shared on Hacker News. If you enable JavaScript in regular searches (not required), you can use a GUI next to search results to boost, downrank, or discard results from specific domains and export your current list as an optic.
I have been playing around with Stract a bit and it is impressive for what it is in its early stages. It is a serviceable generalist search engine for limited purposes. At this stage, it does not match Marginalia in its independent/old site index (e.g., my site is partially indexed in Stract but just about fully indexed by Marginalia and everything else; I do not think the Yukinu Blog is in Stract yet but there are a few Lainchan webring sites). I agree with Yukinu's search engine experiment take-away of preferring site-specific searches (e.g., I use shortcuts for Arch Wiki, VNDB, and many other sites), but Stract is not too far off from having a good enough index to be molded into a sort of combination of Marginalia + useful resources for specific use-cases.