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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? what is the 'gist' of the document?) 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 users.
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. All completely automatically.
Check out the installation instructions here.
Run the indexer, as explained here.
Then, type:
python run.py
Go to 0.0.0.0:5000 in your browser. You're ready to search.