Totally agree. I was just trying to figure out what it is. Even something a small as a subheading like Wikipedia ("The Free Encyclopedia") does would be very helpful.
> [W]e’re crawling up to a million pages a day, as you can see on our stats page.
> Given that Mwmbl is still relatively unknown, it seems plausible that we can reach our target of crawling three billion pages a day, to refresh the entire index in one month.
I think this is supposed to read "it seems plausible that we can reach our target of crawling three million pages a day."
I thought I recalled seeing this before due to its Welsh name and (as is often the case) some are from their domain and some are from the GitHub repo; the ones with over 100 comments are
I remember reading about a project who’s sole purpose is to provide a large index of the open web for free, anyone could download it. Forgot the name of the project.
Why can’t mwmbl download their index?
Also, is mwmbl planning on providing their crawled index for free? Like, can I also download it later?
If that is the case, I’s happily download their FF extension.
I installed the extension because why not, then I noticed it was only crawling spam pages and redirect links that were being abused for spam... I guess it's kind of expected but not sure how I feel about it
Though, it's still a very cool idea, maybe an option to crawl sites I visit would be nice?
> Though, it's still a very cool idea, maybe an option to crawl sites I visit would be nice?
I had an extension installed for a while that submitted pages to the Internet Archive automatically, but it was a constant battle to remember to denylist any sites that were personal (bank, doctor, whatever) before visiting them. That was before I was heavy into the Firefox containers setup, so if I were to try that again I'd try to find a way to disable it for those containers (which, come to think of it, may be yet another container feature request)
Having thought a little further about your suggestion, I could imagine an extension that merely submitted the window.location.origin to the search engine and let it index the site, as a heuristic for "this site is popular enough to have received a visit in the past hour/day/whatever" but with Mwmbl specifically that'd put things back in a loop since it would send the site back to your browser to index it for them
I sure do hope Mwmbl's extension is not using the full browser context to make requests, otherwise any request to index mail.google.com would be no bueno
Well, the internet could know the balance of your bank account at that boutique credit union, or which sex toys you’ve been looking at buying.
We do web hosting for businesses. We are careful to identify bots because we don’t want personalized recommendations in search engines, and don’t want PII showing up. Not that we put a lot of that in the site, but think about a Home Depot or a Best Buy situation. If you’re a human near the Minneapolis store, you want availability for that store, not the Detroit one. But corporate wants a bot to know that this microwave is something you in theory carry, but might have to ship from a warehouse. If Home Depot wants that, and our customers also want that, then probably a lot of businesses feel the same.
I think the saddest part of this is that, owing to the total enshittification of the web due to SEO, at least 50% of what they index will be absolute garbage.
From Github: "Mwmbl is a non-profit, ad-free, free-libre and free-lunch search engine with a focus on useability and speed."