GNV Smallweb Index

cheese AND toast
cheese NOT toast
cheese OR toast
chee*

About GNV

GNV (GNV is Not Veronica) is a search engine for the Smallweb. It currently supports Gopher, Gemini and Spartan protocol.

GNV initially started as a personal research project on Common Lisp, but was quickly adopted by users of the Fediverse. It is free and open source software and available to anyone. The main instance is hosted at gopher.emacs.ch. But we plan to move to a more generic domain at a later stage.

History

It all started with a post from Michał on February 23rd 2024 outlining the necessity for better discovery for Smallweb content.

The idea was born and a few hours later GNV version 1 with 160 lines of code was announced by the author.

At the time, no database was used and everything was stored in a native Common Lisp vector, running on an SBCL procress on the authors local machine, using tailscale to expose it to the Internet. However, memory usage quickly reached unbearable heights, so SQLite was introduced into the project and a place was found to host it on a proper server.

On March 11th 2024, Gemini support was added to the project and announced on the Fediverse. The crawler already indexed over 60.000 Gopher and Gemini pages at the time.

On March 24th 2024, support for Spartan was added.

Since April 1st 2024, GNV fully respects the Gemini's Robots.txt specification with regards to the "indexer" Virtual User Agent for Gemini and Spartan sites.

First appearance on the aNONradio Lispy Gopher Show w/ screwtape

Screwtape, an avid advocate for Gopher, member of the SDF.ORG community, and the host of the Lispy Gopher Show on aNONradio, announced GNV on his show on March 6th 2024. And followed up on a subsequent show by making a use case for GNV as a finder for (cooking) recipes.

Credits

GNV is written in Common Lisp and is a very simple program. It depends on the great work of the following major external projects:

• SBCL Common Lisp Compiler (Public Domain/BSD-style license)
• SQLite database (Public Domain)

Furthermore, the following Common Lisp projects are used in the program itself:

• Hunchentoot web server by Edmund Weitz (BSD-2 license)
• easy-routes by Mariano Montone (MIT license)
• Spinneret HTML5 generator by Paul M. Rodriguez (MIT license)
• QURI URI library by Eitaro Fukamachi (BSD-3 license)
• Mito ORM for SQLite and others by Eitaro Fukamachi (LLGPL license)
• sxql SQL generator by Eitaro Fuckamachi (BSD-3 license)
• local-time Time manipulation library by Daniel Lowe (BSD license)
• Alexandria General purpose library (Public Domain)
• filepaths File path manipulation by Colin Woodbury (LGPL-3.0 license)
• CL+SSL Common Lisp interface to OpenSSL/LibreSSL by Anton Vodonosov (MIT-style license)
• mutility utility library by modula t. (MIT license)
• bordeaux-threads portable threading library by Stelian Ionescu (MIT license)
• cl-sqlite SQLite binding by Jacek Złydach (Public Domain)

I also would like to mention a few other persons who inspired or indirectly helped with the project:

• Screwtape - a Lisper, Climate and Freedom fighter and host of the Lisp Gopher Climate Show on aNONradio (every Wednesday at 00:00 UTC)
• Paul SomeoneElse - a Lisper, and maintainer/provider of Clue, a web todo list written in Common Lisp
• Any many other good Lisp folks in the Fediverse!

Without the Sweat and Tears™ of these and many other people, this project would have been impossible to create and my thanks go to all of them, and others who have not been mentioned by accident.

Source Code and License

GNV is released under the AGPL-3-only license. The source code is freely available (with exception of the Berkeley Mono Font by Berkeley Graphics LLC), generously hosted by Codeberg, the No. 1 Git forge for free and open-source software.

The database content indexed by the GNV crawler is available on request.

Infrastructure

Hosting for GNV is provided by the Emacs.ch fediverse instance, which runs on Hetzner servers in the Finland region.