PeARS

##What is PeARS?

PeARS (Peer-to-peer Agent for Reciprocated Search) is a lightweight, distributed search engine. It relies on people going about their normal business and browsing the web. While they do so, the pages they visit are indexed in the background, and assigned a ‘meaning’ (is this page about cats, fashion, ancient history, Python programming?, etc). From time to time, they can choose to share some or all of these meanings with others, providing the building stones of a giant search engine network, distributed across people. By linking page meanings with real people doing real browsing, PeARS ensures that the nodes in the network are topically coherent: an individual interested in architecture will probably have indexed a lot of web pages on associated topics, providing a potentially relevant cluster for someone with a query on, say, the German ‘Bauhaus’ movement.

To know more head over to: http://aurelieherbelot.net/pears/

##Set up

This is mostly a development setup since we not really production ready yet. You can find a demo of PeARS running over here: http://pearsearch.herokuapp.com/

###Clone this repo

git clone -b development https://github.com/minimalparts/PeARS.git

cd PeARS

###Set up the development environment

1. Set up virtualenv

   We recommend using virtualenv for the development. If you are just here for test it out, skip to the next section.

   Install pip using easy_install

   sudo easy_install pip

   or some other way your distribution supports like:

   sudo yum install python-pip

   Install virtualenv using pip

   sudo pip install virtualenv

   Create a new virtualenv for PeARS and activate it

   virtualenv pears_env && source pears_env/bin/activate

2. Install the build dependencies

   We recommend using pip for installation. In case you don't have this, look inside requirements.txt and install dependencies manually.

   pip install -r requirements.txt

   Run the following in case you are having any issues while running

   python -m textblob.download_corpora lite

3. Get the semantic space

   In the root directory of the repo, run

   wget aurelieherbelot.net/pears-demo/wikiwoods.dump.bz2

   then

   python uncompress_db wikiwoods.dump.bz2

###Running the PeARS search engine

In the root directory of the repo, run

python run.py

Go to the browser and type localhost:5000. You should find PeARS running there.

####That's it, folks!

Please report to us any issues that you face.

###More links:

Code Overview