Hey folks --
Recently, in light of the Snowden leaks, 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).
Centralized corporate search engines such as Google are implicated in
all three of these, i.e. they:
* Monitor what we are searching for
* Censor websites by removing them from search engine indexes
* 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
engines. The few existing solutions like YaCy all seem overly complex
(and thus unusable to most users) and require downloading a standalone
application to use. These standalone P2P search applications don't
really make sense from a usability perspective. It's unrealistic to
expect hundreds of millions of users to download a standalone Java app,
and configure a P2P index node (especially when configuration is as
complex as it is for Yacy).
It seems to me that it would make more sense to use protocols like
WebRTC <http://www.webrtc.org/> to facilitate P2P connectivity in the
web browser, so that the searching and indexing can be done via a simple
browser plugin that can be installed by anyone with one-click. This
would simplify indexing (e.g. just use the bookmarks/recent sites
visited by default, rather than forcing users manually configure it),
and would allow people to just use the browser search bar as usual.
There would still likely need to be some sort of standalone
signaling/tracker servers set up to bootstrap search/index nodes into
the P2P network, but most of the work -- i.e. all of the indexing,
searching, routing, etc. -- would be done by the nodes using the browser
extension. And almost all of the complexity would be hidden from the
average user. If P2P search could be simplified in this manner, I feel
that the adoption would be much more rapid than if P2P search is based
on complex standalone apps.
I have been unable to find anyone who is working on this right now (i.e.
a WebRTC-based P2P search engine), so I'm trying to figure out what
would be needed to make this happen, or if there are things that I'm not
aware of that make this infeasible. I definitely plan to start coding
something later this year when I have the time, but right now I can't
take this on, and wanted throw the idea out so that someone who does can
take it and run with it ...
Thoughts? Do any of you see this being useful? What are some of the
problems/limitations you see arising with WebRTC based P2P search? What
tools would you suggest for getting this implemented in a browser
extension? ...
--Jesse Taylor <http://www.interference.cc>
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