Gemini Universal Search

[solderpunk]

I am very pleased to share with the list that I have been made aware
of an exciting new Gemini project - our first search engine!  It's
called Gemini Universal Search, or (delightfully![1]) GUS for short.
You can find it at gemini://gus.guru/, and there's now a link to it
from the gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space page.  GUS is a project by
Natalie Pendragon, who is subscribed to this list.

In addition to hopefully being an incentive for people to start
producing content, this raises a number of interesting discussion
points for the community.

One technical question is the issue of how server admins can opt out
of having their stuff crawled.  GUS currently recognises a /robots.txt
resource with (I presume) identical syntax to that used for HTTP.
This is certainly one potential solution to the problem (and perhaps
the most sensible one), but we might want to consider others.

One more "community" oriented question is how we might like a Gemini
search engine to work.  Currently, as I understand it, GUS functions
entirely based on the content of resources.  It does not take into
account linking structure, in the way that mainstream web search
engines do.  Depending upon one's perspective, this might be a good
thing or a bad thing.  In general, the way search engines work can
influence the way that people tend to produce content, as people avoid
doing things that they know will lower their search ranking.  It's
well worth thinking about negative consequences this has had for the
web that we want to avoid repeating in Geminispace.

Cheers,
Solderpunk

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gus_Grissom