Alternative to nostr.band for searching for older content? #asknostr GO!
CC: @The Daniel 🖖 saw you mentioning one in the last 24h and can't find that comment...
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What I’ve been saying for a while is that we need a new one. There is no full alternative yet.
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Primal advanced search is excellent. But OP has Primal Derangement Syndrome and likes to cry about it.
That's the one but yeah doesn't seem to have advanced search options similar to nostr.band. Thanks anyway!
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.
Exactly what I’ve been saying.
Same here. I was looking for an older note of mine but all I get is this.
Have you tried @Gigi ANTS? I don't know how far back you want to go but ants seems to go back ~3 years
ants
advanced nostr text search
I’m talking about one that isn’t tied to a specific client though, that’s 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.
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.
I have not, first time hearing about it. Will check it out. Does is have time-based filters?
Honestly one of the best tools I’ve 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.
Advanced Nostr Search
Tool to help you find Nostr notes
No, so will have to do some scrolling to find older notes, but everything is sorted newest to oldest.
So then it’s not really a functional search.
this works. cheers!
🤷♂️ If I need to search the internet I go to Google. I don’t need to have Google replicated in every website. You don’t have to use Primal as your primary client to use it for search, but it also isn’t free. But we’re nostr, and as you alluded, we don’t complain about paying for what we use. $7/month for unlimited access to the best advanced search on Nostr. Not saying it couldn’t 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, it’s an excellent choice.
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
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.
i see @Gigi working on this
ants
advanced nostr text search
Thanks! I found what I was looking for.
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).
Ants worked well. check that out
Where can I find this?
ants.sh
I'm vibing date support as we speak. Give me a minute.
If it doesn’t work on desktop browsers, it’s of very little use to me.
Alright, this should work:
ants
advanced nostr text search
I trust that you’ll figure out the syntax etc on your own, but I also updated the README accordingly.
GitHub
GitHub - dergigi/ants: ants: advanced notes and text search
ants: advanced notes and text search. Contribute to dergigi/ants development by creating an account on GitHub.
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 (that’s 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: it’s 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:
Primal works in desktop browsers though… Not sure what you’re getting at, but what I’m saying is that it is in fact a good option for search on Nostr, perhaps even the only option at the moment. I’m 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 couldn’t get it to really work as a search and it didn’t reliably find the notes I used to test it. It’s an area where nostr has room for improvement, but it’s kind of silly for people to ignore that there is an option for search, even it doesn’t check off all the boxes on your checklist.
Not a Primal hatoor, I’ve just never had a good experience with the desktop client. It seems like it’s been abandoned.
This works well
Advanced Nostr Search
Tool to help you find Nostr notes
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 haven’t done a code review but I think that’s how it works.
What's wrong with nostr.band? Too hard to use?
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 didn’t know how actively this was being developed. Always encouraging to see better search tools being built. We’ve been struggling without them.
I'm building ants (and boris) on the side, just for fun, just for myself. If it doesn’t work for you that’s too bad. Feel free to fork it and implement any and all features to your heart’s desire. In today’s day and age most features are just a prompt away, and I’d love to a proliferation of forks. If something is done in good taste and useful, I’ll merge it upstream.
Yay, I'm glad my little thing was useful! 🫂
Been working fine for me, but your experience is your experience. The github for their web app shows recent and regular updates so doesn’t seem to be abandoned at all.
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 time…
your kind 10002 relays do not have the final bar "/"
@jb55 mentioned a few days ago that nostrdb could be used to build a Nostr Time Machine and presumably a contextual advanced search, but I’m not familiar with how it works.
ah no an error on my side found your relays...
My experience comes from doing a lot of searches for peoples’ 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 doesn’t bode well.
Doesn’t bode well for you. It works fine for me on desktop and mobile. But I have no idea why the differences in our experiences. 😂🤷♂️
I use what works for me.
Good strategy 🫡
It's not working as it used to do.