OfflineWeb : what, how
Today, on August 14, 2020 internet is available to to only 59% of population (4.57B people) source.
73% of USA adults have access to home brodband. source
FCC broadband deployment shows vast areas of rural USA don’t have fixed broadband.
This lead us to believe there would be a reasonable amount of need of reliable, fast access to internet without a lot of infrastructure or involvement of various organization.
OfflineWeb aims to enable users to search through contents of Wikipedia and Gutenberg via a wifi hotspot. The wifi hotspot will expose an SSID or access point. User will gain access to a search page once they connect to the SSID. The web application will be able to search through contents of Wikipedia and books from Gutenberg and read in whole.
During the first phase of this project we used barebones pc (1) with wifi adapter (1) to create the wifi hotspot. OS of choice was Ubuntu 16.04. We had used AMP stack to create the user web application. Apache Lucene 4.x was used to create full text index. The project was functional, but not manageable or scalable. By scalable we mean -
- create and refresh indices periodically to include new documents, and update old ones
- being able to build similar machine for distribution efficiently (referred as box)
We intend to create this version with a focus on manageability. We broke the project in three major parts.