Chaos Feminist Convention

Decentralising Web search
Sprache: English

  • 05.07.2025 , Brave Ben (BBB)
  • 05.07.2025 , Saal

Alle Zeiten in Europe/Berlin

PeARS is an open-source, decentralised Web search engine that you can run from your own server. We show how it can be used as an alternative to the dominant solutions.


It is widely believed that Web search engines require immense resources to operate, making it impossible for small communities to build alternatives to the dominant players. The PeARS project (https://pearsproject.org/) aims at changing the status quo by providing open-source search tools that can be used by anyone, anywhere. To achieve this, it combines algorithms that run on entry-level hardware, using both traditional and modern machine learning techniques. This talk will show how PeARS can easily be deployed to provide community-based search solutions: for instance for underrepresented groups or minority languages. We will see how the system can be trained and populated and how it can be tailored to the specific community it is addressed to. We will also give a glimpse into cross-instance search and show how to search the entire PeARS network from a local instance.


Standort

In place

wird aufgezeichnet – Ja wird gestreamt – Ja hybrid verfügbar – Ja

Aurelie Herbelot is a researcher in the area of Computational Linguistics. After gaining her PhD from the University of Cambridge in 2010, she worked at various European institutions, most recently at the Center for Mind and Brain Sciences, University of Trento (Italy).

Aurelie has been passionate about free software and open science for many years. Since 2016, she leads the PeARS project , an open-source community effort aimed at developing a low-resource, decentralised Web search engine.

You will also find Aurelie on stage at the Malersaal, SchauSpielHaus Hamburg, doing AI critique in the show Maschinenraum der Zukunft (together with philosopher Eva von Redecker).

Pronouns: she/her
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