About a decade ago, I tried to index the web via the Dewey Decimal System. I had a site laid out similar to Google, where you could browse sites continuously starting from a given call, but the DDS is proprietary, and those people hate anyone who uses their IP without a license. You can Google everyone they’ve shutdown – places that weren’t even libraries – for using anything similar to the DDS. I reached out to the group that manages the DDS, and was taken offline before my project even started.

With all the corporate BS lately, and people looking for alternative options, I thought I’d take a search engine old school, and we’d index like Usenet. Except with an XXX.XXX.XXX format.

My original project used sharded Redis, with append logs to disk. I chose it for its in-memory speed and key-value store. Did some calculations, and I’d have to have millions of records just to consume my entire system’s memory.

I had a lot of plans for this before getting shut down.

Now that I’m older, I’m curious if I should be using MongoDB.

What are the benefits and drawbacks of each? Which would you use? And why?