Published on 03 January 2026.
Ever since I made the first version of IndieWeb Search, a search engine that let you search personal websites, I have been thinking about the idea of “community search engines.”
A community search engine indexes materials related to a specific community. The information sources are hand-picked to reflect the interests of the community. This may include blogs, feeds, social media firehoses, and more. The goal of a community search engine is not to index the web – rather, to index a slice of web pages and other resources that are relevant to the group.
The successor to IndieWeb Search [1], IndieWeb Discover, foll…
Published on 03 January 2026.
Ever since I made the first version of IndieWeb Search, a search engine that let you search personal websites, I have been thinking about the idea of “community search engines.”
A community search engine indexes materials related to a specific community. The information sources are hand-picked to reflect the interests of the community. This may include blogs, feeds, social media firehoses, and more. The goal of a community search engine is not to index the web – rather, to index a slice of web pages and other resources that are relevant to the group.
The successor to IndieWeb Search [1], IndieWeb Discover, follows feeds published by several dozen personal websites that write about or have written about the indie web. IndieWeb Discover, rather than sorting results by relevance, sorts results in reverse chronological order, allowing you to discover new blog posts on a given topic. It is, in a way, a community search engine, but also a community discovery engine – a place where people can go to discover blog posts on a given topic they may not otherwise have found.
Here is an example of an IndieWeb Discover page for the query “indieweb carnival”:
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A list of blog posts that contain the term "indieweb carnival" displayed on a search results page.
IndieWeb Discover is an experiment, one that I have had running in the background for a while but haven’t really announced or done anything with. I have found interesting blog posts through it, so I thought I would finally take the time to share the project on this blog.
Personal web search engine
In addition to a community-oriented search engine, a personal search engine could exist that indexes web pages of interest to you.
My version of a personal search engine is the search provided by Artemis, the web reader I use and maintain. This search feature returns web pages published in the web feeds followed by a user. In my case, Artemis shows results from sites I follow like blogs and art news and more. With my web reader’s search feature, I often find blog posts from authors I love. My search results will not be relevant to you – being mainly personal blogs I enjoy – but your own search engine could be relevant specifically for you.
Here is an example of a search result for the query “Taylor Swift” in my personal Artemis search feature:
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My Artemis search results for the query "taylor swift".
The topic of information retrieval fascinates me perhaps because of the consequence of the fundamental question it concerns: How can and do we find information? Following on from this: How can we find information more effectively? (And, indeed, what does ”effectively” mean?)
I am going to keep thinking about this topic and I’d love to read more about it! If you can recommend any blog posts – or feel inspired and share your thoughts on your website – please send me an email!
[1]: The original IndieWeb Search used a complex technology stack, relying on Elasticsearch. This made the tool difficult to maintain. The successor, IndieWeb Discover, relies on a Sqlite database. While not offering full text search with keyword relevance-based ranking that IndieWeb Search offered, Discover has been fun to use!