PeARS (Peer-to-peer Agent for Reciprocated Search) is a lightweight, distributed search engine. It relies on people going about their normal business and browsing the web. While they do so, the pages they visit are indexed in the background, and assigned a ‘meaning’ (is this page about cats, fashion, ancient history, Python programming?, etc). From time to time, they can choose to share some or all of these meanings with others, providing the building stones of a giant search engine network, distributed across people. By linking page meanings with real people doing real browsing, PeARS ensures that the nodes in the network are topically coherent: an individual interested in architecture will probably have indexed a lot of web pages on associated topics, providing a potentially relevant cluster for someone with a query on, say, the German ‘Bauhaus’ movement.
To know more head over to: http://aurelieherbelot.net/pears/
This is mostly a development setup since we not really production ready yet. You can find a demo of PeARS running over here: http://pearsearch.herokuapp.com/
git clone -b development https://github.com/minimalparts/PeARS.git
cd PeARS
Set up virtualenv
We recommend using virtualenv for the development. If you are just here for test it out, skip to the next section.
Install pip using easy_install
sudo easy_install pip
or some other way your distribution supports like:
sudo yum install python-pip
Install virtualenv using pip
sudo pip install virtualenv
Create a new virtualenv for PeARS and activate it
virtualenv pears_env && source pears_env/bin/activate
Install the build dependencies
We recommend using pip for installation. In case you don't have this, look inside requirements.txt and install dependencies manually.
pip install -r requirements.txt
Run the following in case you are having any issues while running
python -m textblob.download_corpora lite
Get the semantic space
In the root directory of the repo, run
wget aurelieherbelot.net/pears-demo/wikiwoods.dump.bz2
then
python uncompress_db wikiwoods.dump.bz2
In the root directory of the repo, run
python run.py
Go to the browser and type localhost:5000. You should find PeARS running there.
Please report to us any issues that you face.