Alternative to nostr.band for searching for older content? #asknostr GO!
CC: nostr:npub1aeh2zw4elewy5682lxc6xnlqzjnxksq303gwu2npfaxd49vmde6qcq4nwx saw you mentioning one in the last 24h and can't find that comment...
Discussion
What Iāve been saying for a while is that we need a new one. There is no full alternative yet.
nostr:note1rw696qzfr4ng9508xglk5444h3q8nst7l5vwc6a7tckw6z29tllqhct6ap
Primal advanced search is excellent. But OP has Primal Derangement Syndrome and likes to cry about it.
Iām talking about one that isnāt tied to a specific client though, thatās what a new replacement for nostr.band would need to be. It can even be zap-gated, if the search result quality was worth paying for.
š¤·āāļø If I need to search the internet I go to Google. I donāt need to have Google replicated in every website. You donāt have to use Primal as your primary client to use it for search, but it also isnāt free. But weāre nostr, and as you alluded, we donāt complain about paying for what we use. $7/month for unlimited access to the best advanced search on Nostr. Not saying it couldnāt be more versatile by then allowing it to be integrated into other clients, but even if you only use Primal.net or their app as your dedicated nostr search engine, itās an excellent choice.
If it doesnāt work on desktop browsers, itās of very little use to me.
Primal works in desktop browsers thoughā¦ Not sure what youāre getting at, but what Iām saying is that it is in fact a good option for search on Nostr, perhaps even the only option at the moment. Iām not aware of other search providers on nostr right now, but if a better one comes along, whether from Primal or anyone else, it will be a good thing. Yakihonne recently added some decent filters for creating feeds, but I couldnāt get it to really work as a search and it didnāt reliably find the notes I used to test it. Itās an area where nostr has room for improvement, but itās kind of silly for people to ignore that there is an option for search, even it doesnāt check off all the boxes on your checklist.
Not a Primal hatoor, Iāve just never had a good experience with the desktop client. It seems like itās been abandoned.
Been working fine for me, but your experience is your experience. The github for their web app shows recent and regular updates so doesnāt seem to be abandoned at all.
My experience comes from doing a lot of searches for peoplesā first Nostr notes and had much more success finding them with a combination of nostr.band and advancednostrsearch than I did using Primal. I gave it a fair shot.
Also I just tried the Primal destkop search now and it complete froze my browser. So that really doesnāt bode well.
That's the one but yeah doesn't seem to have advanced search options similar to nostr.band. Thanks anyway!
Exactly what Iāve been saying.
Nos.lol has been decently reliable. I've been test benching a bunch of relays as I build out a client. For full completeness.
What we really need is a follower aggregator (if one exists, please advise). Followers are a harder client-side problem to solve than meets the eye.
Npub creation date too.
Thanks! I found what I was looking for.
I was thinking about this issue, too! I regularly would like to find old events (especially my own) and don't have a good solution yet.
Same here. I was looking for an older note of mine but all I get is this.
Do you have more specifics on the note?
Rough dates, rough keywords?
I'll throw it in my bench tester and see if I can find it. Will be a good test.
Yeah I do. I remember things I've said just not when. I found it!
I just had an idea for a work-around:
If you use 'citrine' as a local back-up relay, every event can be downloaded.
The problem here is, that I don't know how to search in long lists of events. Or if there are event IDs which I could copy (to use in a client, for example).
Have you tried nostr:nprofile1qqsxu35yyt0mwjjh8pcz4zprhxegz69t4wr9t74vk6zne58wzh0waycpt3mhxue69uhhqun00pujumn0wd68yttjv4kxz7fwv9c8qte4vscxgvecv9nxxdpevv6xywp5vdsnqerp8y6nzcfnxvmxzenxvycnsdpn8pjkvetyxvcryct9v4jxvcfexfjkywrzxpjrxenrvgurwqgkwaehxw309amk7apwv3jhyemfva5jucm0d5hszxrhwden5te0wfjkccte9ejx2un8d9nkjtnrdakj7h0jgy8 ANTS? I don't know how far back you want to go but ants seems to go back ~3 years
I have not, first time hearing about it. Will check it out. Does is have time-based filters?
Honestly one of the best tools Iāve used has been this one, which is really bare bones, but I use it to find tons of old content. It piggybacks off of nostr.band, though, so it only works intermittently.
No, so will have to do some scrolling to find older notes, but everything is sorted newest to oldest.
So then itās not really a functional search.
You can sort search results by chronological or reverse-chronological order. In combination with `since:` and `until:` this should get you quite far in narrowing things down.
Thanks! I didnāt know how actively this was being developed. Always encouraging to see better search tools being built. Weāve been struggling without them.
One part of this particular puzzle is data availability, i.e. users will have to either pay for archival services (read: large relays) or run their own [archival] relays for the stuff that they care about (mostly their own notes, and notes they have interacted with).
nostr-relay-tray and similar efforts are a step in the right direction. I mention nostr-relay-tray specifically because it supports NIP-50 search out of the box, which is fantastic.
One step at a timeā¦
nostr:npub1xtscya34g58tk0z605fvr788k263gsu6cy9x0mhnm87echrgufzsevkk5s mentioned a few days ago that nostrdb could be used to build a Nostr Time Machine and presumably a contextual advanced search, but Iām not familiar with how it works.
I'm building ants (and boris) on the side, just for fun, just for myself. If it doesnāt work for you thatās too bad. Feel free to fork it and implement any and all features to your heartās desire. In todayās day and age most features are just a prompt away, and Iād love to a proliferation of forks. If something is done in good taste and useful, Iāll merge it upstream.
Vercel is amazing at querying relays
Way better than any client out there. You should see the bench tester I'm playing with, to truly understand "Nostr Notification Completeness".
I'm going to build the best resilient client on Nostr
I'm vibing date support as we speak. Give me a minute.
Alright, this should work: https://ants.sh/?q=GM+by%3Adergigi+since%3A2024-01-01+until%3A2024-03-31
I trust that youāll figure out the syntax etc on your own, but I also updated the README accordingly.
And to clarify some of the things that came up in this thread: ants is just a search interface, independent of any specific clients or relays.
If search is required to resolve a query it will hit NIP-50 relays exclusively, depending on what kind of relays you have in your relay lists (thatās why logging in is a good idea). It defaults to nostr band and other bigger relays, but if you run nostr-relay-tray or other personal or local relays it can (and will) search those too.
Disclaimer: itās neither perfect nor very efficient or performant, but it works for me, and I built it because I was as frustrated with existing search solutions as you seem to be right now.
I talk about some of these frustrations here: nostr:nevent1qqstgekdlmaeu3n6gf3ss7nnlq4f0hfx3nm3nmy0pf84xs7e98wyt2ssw5p34
i see nostr:npub1dergggklka99wwrs92yz8wdjs952h2ux2ha2ed598ngwu9w7a6fsh9xzpc working on this
This works well
It works as long as nostr.band API is working.
I did not know that. TIL
Are the website and relay linked in a way or two separate things? If the website stops working is it the same for the relay?
The app is basically just a simple query tool for nostr.band, which has a lot of performance issues.
I meant https://nostr.band and wss://relay.nostr.band
I guess. I havenāt done a code review but I think thatās how it works.
