Tomek Wałkuski @tomekw@mastodon.social

TIL that:

select * from user;

and

select * from "user";

CAN yield different results. I had assumed that the quotes were simply to keep uppercase characters from turning into lowercase or something.

In my case, the first one gives me results from the internal PG user table, and the second gives me results from... my project's "user" table. Yikes.

Design goals for a FOSS search engine:

- FOSS but centralized, don't bother with distributed crawling or federation or anything, at least not until we can prove that we can do it the easy way. Apply the SourceHut model.

- Don't blithely crawl the whole WWW. Tier 1 sites opt-in to being crawled and are manually reviewed by a human to establish lack of shit. Backlinks from tier 1 sites are crawled to form a tier 2 graph. There is no tier 3. Searches prioritize tier 1 results. (De-emphasizes blogspam in favor of primary sources, entirely eliminates SEO gaming).

- Attempt to index any data source (HTML, Gemtext, man pages, a CSV file) and return any results that either (1) the User-Agent can present, or (2) we have some code to render in a format the U-A can present, or (3) the user explicitly asked for

Problem: who's going to pay for it? Answer: probably SourceHut if we ever get to, say, 10x our current revenue.