Replacing corporate search engines with anonymous/decentralized search

[Eric Mill]

Right now, I'd even settle for a competitive, interesting marketplace of
corporate search engines.


On Sun, Dec 29, 2013 at 3:17 AM, Jesse R. Taylor
<jessetaylor84 at riseup.net>wrote:

>  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 <http://www.interference.cc>
>



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