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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- It's anti #LLM: we make use of relatively old-school statistical #NLProc methods that have a much smaller resource & carbon footprint than LLMs do.
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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