I decided to check out Stract, an open source search engine, as I was curious whether my site was indexed yet or not. Turns out, it is!

OK, well that’s cool. So what else does stracting (is that what I’d call searching for something in Stract?) for “shellsharks” give me in the results? A few interesting results, but pretty limited overall, with one particularly weird quirk. I get a few interesting personal blogs that have referenced me or my site. Nice! I get one site about “Polynesia” which I can only assume shows up because they have a lot of shells and sharks there. I get a few links to other social profiles of mine. Finally, and this is the quirky result, I get several (like 8) pages worth of Lobste.rs Users listings.

Not sure why their indexing of Lobste.rs resulted in so many duplicate (and not very useful) result records but that’s where we stand.

Anyways, I think Stract is an awesome project and I really hope they can continue to receive funding and support and turn it into something that is AI-free, has indexed a wider swath of the IndieWeb and can recreate some of the early days Google magic.