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Comment by waynecochran | Hacker News Reader

In a nutshell, what is the fundamental difference with this search engine compared to others?

>About Alexandria

Alexandria.org is a non-profit, ad free search engine. Our goal is to provide the best available information without compromise.

The index is built on data from Common Crawl and the engine is written in C++. The source code is available here.

We are still at an early stage of development and running the search engine on a shoestring budget.

Please contact us at -email- if you want to get involved, want to support this initiative or have any questions.

But what is different in terms of its indexing algorithm? The original secret sauce for google was the pagerank algorithm which was mathematically genius. Are you using a similar algorithm.

Founder here. We are using harmonic centrality instead of pagerank. But of course much more work needs to be done to make the search engine usable.

I'm curious as to which reasons/tradeoffs were involved in the decision to use harmonic centrality, if you wouldn't mind sharing.

Their About page has you covered:

> Alexandria.org is a non-profit, ad free search engine. Our goal is to provide the best available information without compromise.

> The index is built on data from Common Crawl and the engine is written in C++. The source code is available (at https://github.com/alexandria-org#).

Edit: formatting

More about Common Crawl: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Crawl

> Common Crawl is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization that crawls the web and freely provides its archives and datasets to the public. Common Crawl's web archive consists of petabytes of data collected since 2011. It completes crawls generally every month. ...

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