Searchnos: an experimental implementation of NIP-50

This is a relay-like bridge server that provides a Nostr full-text search capability by using Elasticsearch as a backend. It emulates real-time search by polling Elasticsearch.

Searchnos works like a relay, with a few exceptions.

The most significant difference is that queries without the search property are ignored. This is mainly for load control; since Searchnos cannot respond so fast, it is intended to be used in conjunction with other regular relays that can handle non-search queries at great speed.

Another difference is that Searchnos does not accept EVENT messages from regular connections. When opening a WebSocket connection, if a pre-configured API key is specified as ?api_key=foo query parameter, the connection is treated specially as an administrative connection. Searchnos only receives EVENTs from such connections.

Current Limitations

• Supports filters that contains "search" property.
• No spam filtering. 🙁
• No indexing configurations. Just does N-gram indexing with some normalization.

Usage

Start server:

cp .env.example .env
# Edit .env to configure relays to connect to
docker compose up

Search:

wscat --connect ws://localhost:3000
Connected (press CTRL+C to quit)
> ["REQ", "SEARCH_TEST", {"search": "nostr"}]
(...snip...)
< ["EOSE","SEARCH_TEST"]
>

Configuration

See compose.yaml and .env.example for the configuration.

SRC_RELAYS and DEST_RELAYS can be a comma-separated list of relay URLs.