PeARS

Important If you are planning on trying out PeARS, head over to the development branch. The masters branch is by now very out-of-date, and the information below is too!

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 webpages on art, construction and engineering topics. A dog trainer may have spent time buying equipment from online companies she trusts. By sharing the relevant part of their history, they make other people on the PeARS network able to use their specialised knowledge.

Think of PeARS as a layer of virtual agents underlying a community of real people. Your virtual agent is responsible for sharing your Web knowledge in the way you choose, and for contacting other people’s agents to help you answer your queries. This behaviour is very similar to the way people behave offline, both in terms of advertising particular specialisations and of looking for relevant sources when seeking information.

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 git@github.com:PeARSearch/PeARS.git

cd PeARS

Set up the development environment

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
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
Get the semantic space

In the root directory of the repo, run

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

then

./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.

PeARSearch/PeARS