FAQ

Is Gnarl a blockchain?

No. There is no ledger, no token, and no consensus round in the query path. Gnarl uses signatures for attribution — proving a manifest or a result came from a particular node, unaltered. It never needs the network to agree on a global ordering of anything.

How is this different from cross-cluster search or federation?

Federation usually means a coordinator that knows about a fixed set of remote clusters, configured by hand. Gnarl has no fixed set and no coordinator: nodes discover each other, advertise what they can answer, and any node can plan a query. Adding capacity is starting a process, not editing a topology.

Does my data leave my node?

Querying does not ship your corpus. Documents are indexed locally and matched locally, and what crosses the network for a search is the manifest — a signed summary of what you can answer — plus the query, plus whatever hits your own policy permits you to return.

Replication does move data, deliberately. An index with mesh or public placement puts copies of its segments on other peers, which is how an answer survives the machine that learned it going to sleep. Those are real bytes on a real other machine. Set an index to local and it stays here, with no replica to answer from when this node is offline.

Nothing goes to Lucenia either way. There is no account and no server of ours in the path.

What happens when nodes are offline?

The query returns without them and says so. Every response carries a coverage object with how many nodes were eligible, asked, and answered. Partial results are normal and always visible as partial.

How do I know results were not tampered with?

Each result batch is signed by the node that produced it, not the node that merged it. A coordinator that alters a hit invalidates a signature it cannot forge. Clients verify by default.

Can a node lie about what it holds?

A node can withhold — it may always decline to return a document it has. It cannot forge someone else's manifest or results, and it cannot claim content under another identity. In open networks, clients can restrict results to pinned identities.

Is it slower than a single cluster?

For a query that a single cluster could answer entirely from local disk, yes, slightly — you pay one network round trip to the slowest node you asked. In exchange you skip the hours or weeks of ingestion required to put the data in that cluster in the first place. Deadlines and streaming keep the tail from setting the pace.

What query language does it use?

JSON clauses over HTTP: match, term, range, geo_distance, geo_shape, knn, and bool composition. See the Query API.

Does it support vector search?

Yes. dense_vector is a field type and knn is a query clause. Vectors are embedded and searched on the node that holds the data, the same as any other field.

Is Gnarl open source?

No, and it does not claim to be. The client SDKs are open source (Apache-2.0) and will stay that way. The node is source available under the Lucenia Competitive Extraction License: you can read it, build it, modify it for your own use, and run it — on any number of peers, with no license key and no registration. What the license withholds is offering a competing product built out of it.

There is no per-peer free tier because there is no per-peer charge. More peers is the product working, not a bigger bill.

What is the relationship to Lucenia?

Gnarl is built by Lucenia, the team behind distributed search at planetary scale. Lucenia is a search and retrieval platform; Gnarl is the decentralized network layer.

Can Gnarl run on a phone?

Yes. A peer is not a machine class. The same node runs on server racks, desktops, laptops, and mobile devices on iOS and Android — collecting, indexing, and answering at the edge, with no privileged tier in between.

Why a St. Bernard?

His name is Gnarly. A St. Bernard finds what is buried, in bad conditions, without being told exactly where to look — and brings back something useful. That is the product description. The barrel carries the Gnarl knot: an unbroken loop with no beginning and no center, which is also the topology.