Replacing corporate search engines with anonymous/decentralized search

coderman coderman at gmail.com
Tue Dec 31 19:00:10 PST 2013


On Tue, Dec 31, 2013 at 6:37 AM, Lodewijk andré de la porte
<l at odewijk.nl> wrote:
> I'd like to ask people to wonder what Search Engines really do for us. Where
> is the catalog? Where is the cultivated list of good resources?
>
> Do search engines provide the same level of guidance to its users that a
> written overview can?

what you want more than traditional search is resource discovery,
which includes recommendation and per-peer-perspective reputation.
this is an area where centralized search is incapable or untrustworthy
enough compared to fully decentralized options.

done centrally, that central trusted party would be privy to all your
inter-peer interactions.  in decentralized fashion this exposes only
limited information to each peer.  (central services usually paying
the cost of the infrastructure to analyze all to all interactions by
selling your private information to third parties, or delegating to
those who do...)



> Why don't we create a distributed website catalog? It's harder, as anti-spam
> is the core feature. But competing with Google seems rather foolhardy at the
> moment.

public web is a small slice of all that is of interest.  just put a
internet archive.org copy on a hidden Tahoe-LAFS and everyone gets a
copy of the public web for local querying. (better yet, make a PIR
LAFS ;)
... this would need a little coding *grin*




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