Recently there has been a lot of focus on the importance of developing more secure alternatives to email, instant messaging, browsing, etc. ... but I've seen very little focus on the need for development of alternatives to corporate search engines.

Corporate/state control of the Internet involves a three pronged strategy of: mass surveillance, censorship/criminalization of undesirable ideas, and traffic shaping (i.e. directing people away of things you don't want them to see, and towards things you do). Corporate search engines are implicated in all three of these, i.e. they:

1) Monitor what we are searching for
2) Censor websites by removing them from search engine indexes
3) Shape traffic via non-transparent algorithms that can sort search results in a way that grants prominence to certain types of sites (corporate media, etc.), in order to suit the interests of multinational corporations and governments.

... so obviously, developing alternatives to corporate search is every bit as crucial for protecting privacy and free speech as encrypting our emails/chats, and anonymizing our browsing ...

But I've seen very little information about practical/simple options that are available for anonymous and decentralized Internet search software. I've only been able to find a few examples like YaCy, but they all seem overly complex and unusable by the vast majority of users. What are the major barriers to creating simple tools (e.g. a plugin for Firefox) that would enable users to perform anonymous, p2p web search (even if it's much slower than centralized search) and break away from using corporate search? Which current efforts to create decentralized search seem most promising to you from a privacy/security standpoint?

-- Jesse Taylor