Replacing corporate search engines with anonymous/decentralized search

[Jesse R. Taylor]

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
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://cpunks.org/pipermail/cypherpunks/attachments/20131229/cabf3678/attachment.html>