There are multiple things here - scraped data (reduced to plain text, which what we search, and maybe images, I dunno) caches, aggregation (at least word frequency per object) caches, index (word to aggregation caches?) caches, and the thing that takes a request, retrieves index caches, finds objects, and retrieves them. Things in that tree may be, ahem, again, cached.
So - everything called “cache” here can be put onto something like NOSTR relays or Usenet servers, and given credibility by trusted entity signing it, some kind of web of trust may work, or maybe inherited scores, and what not. What is called “thing” may be local, but its local caches might be exchanged with new peers.
OK, I lack the mathematical apparatus. And I don’t know how search engines work.
Is a distributed search engine possible?
There are multiple things here - scraped data (reduced to plain text, which what we search, and maybe images, I dunno) caches, aggregation (at least word frequency per object) caches, index (word to aggregation caches?) caches, and the thing that takes a request, retrieves index caches, finds objects, and retrieves them. Things in that tree may be, ahem, again, cached.
So - everything called “cache” here can be put onto something like NOSTR relays or Usenet servers, and given credibility by trusted entity signing it, some kind of web of trust may work, or maybe inherited scores, and what not. What is called “thing” may be local, but its local caches might be exchanged with new peers.
OK, I lack the mathematical apparatus. And I don’t know how search engines work.