Why SearchFOSS?
1) We believe that access to web information should be community-based and not owned by big corporations. By using SearchFOSS or any other @pears instance you contribute to this!
2) It's curated: we rely on wisdom of the crowd to have an index that's as useful as possible with a minimum of use. We are exploring limited automated indexing (e.g. following RSS feeds of trusted sources) to help grow the index faster, but won't do indiscriminate scraping.
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Why SearchFOSS?
1) We believe that access to web information should be community-based and not owned by big corporations. By using SearchFOSS or any other @pears instance you contribute to this!
2) It's curated: we rely on wisdom of the crowd to have an index that's as useful as possible with a minimum of use. We are exploring limited automated indexing (e.g. following RSS feeds of trusted sources) to help grow the index faster, but won't do indiscriminate scraping.
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4) It's federated: similar to how #mastodon & #fediverse work, your instance is your local community but you're part of a larger and growing network. If you search on SearchFOSS, you get both local information and results from the @pears network. Some cool related remote instances are ai-pears.org and retronlp.org
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6) It's FOSS software! You can find us at https://github.com/PeARSearch/PeARS-federated/
7) It's free! PeARS is funded by donations (https://opencollective.com/possible-worlds-research/projects/decentralized-web-search) & by PeARS developers making specialized instances on request for individuals and organizations. The public instances will always belong to the community - and anyone is free and very encouraged to set up their own instance and further grow and decentralize the network!
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