The ipfs-search.com IPFS search engine was shut down recently, it’s not clear if it will operate again. This was a great service and i hope they can find the funding and motivation to reopen it.
Are there other ipfs search engines out there which provide a REST API like ipfs-search did ?
I have been following them for a year. I think the only approach to make this sustainable is for IPFS itself to make it obligatory for peers to do indexing jobs all the time in exchange for using the network. That way it will be a truly decentralized search engine by default. All other attempts are more or less centralized and rely on organized server clusters.
That’s an interesting idea, the indexing algorithm would have to be fast and very low on resources … There are already some decentralized ipfs search engines out there but i haven’t used any of them. ipfs-search is really cool they put a lot of work in scaling it up i hope they can get funded at some point and bring it back to life.
ipfs-search has their github repo that you can run locally. I have it running in docker-compose but I’m still struggling to access the indexed hashes with ipfs-desktop. I’m not sure how to add it as a pinning service. I also can’t seem to make a post on the help section about this issue so this is the most topical place for my problem.
Its good that it is down. It encouraged piracy.
After DHT privacy redesign it will not work very well because it can’t snoop network anymore - it has to be some kind of opt-in.