For context I created a video search engine last year, I shut it down and put the data online. You can read about it here: https://www.bendangelo.me/2024/07/16/failed-attempt-at-creating-a-video-search-engine/
I put that project on hold because of scaling issues, anyway I’m back with an other idea. I’ve been frustrated with how AI slop is ruining the internet and recently it’s been hitting Youitube pretty hard with AI videos. I’m brainstorming a tool for people to selfhost:
Self-hosted crawler: Pick which sites/videos to index (blogs, forums, YT channels, etc.). AI chat interface: Ask questions like, “Show me Rust tutorials from 2023” or “Summarize recent posts about homelab backups.” Optional sharing: Pool indexes with trusted friends/communities.
Why? No Google/YouTube spam—only content you choose. Works offline (archive forums, videos, docs). Local AI (Mistral) or cloud (paid) for smarter searches.
Would this be useful to you? What sites would you crawl? Any killer features I’m missing?
Prototype in progress—just testing interest!
For the average consumer of AI, it’s a novelty at this point, even tho we have been using pieces parts of AI for a long while now. But it’s getting it’s stride in stuff like face swaps, neat tiktok videos, making weird pictures. I liken it to when ‘the cloud’ came to town. Hell, we’ve been uploading to servers and running apps on servers for a long while before ‘the cloud’ happened. Everyone and their brother trampled each other to move their entire operations to the cloud. Then, as the dust all settled, we started realizing that not everything that could be in the cloud, should be in the cloud, and so things got back to normal. But just the words ‘the cloud’ made CEOs jizz their pants at one time.
Sameie, sameie with AI. It’s a selling point. There was a thread here I believe, talking about an AI rice cooker. The ‘AI’ part sells it, even tho we’ve been making excellent rice for millennia. I use AI. I find it a faster way to cut through all the searches and give bulleted points to deviate from. I realize that it’s not best practice to rely on AI’s word, but use it as a springboard into further investigation.