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Free Software Activists Take On Google Search
alphadogg writes "Free software activists have released a peer-to-peer search engine to take on Google, Yahoo, Bing and others. The free, distributed search engine, YaCy, takes a new approach to search. Rather than using a central server, its search results come from a network of independent 'peers,' users who have downloaded the YaCy software. The aim is that no single entity gets to decide what gets listed, or in which order results appear. 'Most of what we do on the Internet involves search. It's the vital link between us and the information we're looking for. For such an essential function, we cannot rely on a few large companies and compromise our privacy in the process,' said Michael Christen, YaCy's project leader."
Result: Search results will be controlled by botnets
Will one client be able to view the queries of its peers?
If yes, how is that an improvement?
If no, how does it work?
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
Awesome...
It's hard to argue with "free" and "freedom", so I give it the thumbs up. But in this day and age it feels like going from a Ducati Panigale to a 1950's Triumph Bonneville.
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
Yahoo's search engine IS Bing.
"Even for Slashdot, that was a very obscure reference!" - Anonymous Coward
Haven't you heard? It's distributed! IT'S DISTRIBUTED! IT HAS TO BE PERFECT!
Are you seriously telling me that the Cloud isn't perfect? It's distributed!
Are you seriously telling me that Diaspora isn't the most secure and perfect social media platform? It's distributed!
Distributed is clearly the key to software perfection.
Of course they decide to give it a name that doesn't even look like a word. I can't think of a singled popular search engine that doesn't have a catchy name. How do these free software developers expect the word to get around about their software when nobody can pronounce it and probably won't even remember what it was called? Especially a peer to peer search engine which I would imagine depends even more on a decent amount of people actually using it than a regular search engine.
While these things can succeed on the backs of some philanthropic individuals, it's just human nature that to get a decent community, you need to benefit the supporters in some way.
Doesn't need to be any formal system. Free software, for example, seems to be based more on the honour system than anything else, but people do develop free software because there's something in it for them - software tailored to their needs. What is the incentive for being a search peer?
I was going to load up a peer but there's no way i'm running Java. I've almost completely excised it from all of my computers, no going back.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
This whole concept seems quite fascinating/interesting. Ironically, two questions came to my mind immediately:
1) How much bandwidth does this take?
2) How much disk space does this take?
Neither question is answered on their FAQ ( http://www.yacy-websuche.de/wiki/index.php/En:FAQ ), although they addressed the disk space issue thus: "Can I limit the size of the indexes on my hard-drive? For the moment no. Automatically limiting that size would mean having to delete stored indexes, which is not suitable. "
Yikes! I am not sure how many people will want to run a local YaCy client when there is no control over how much disk space it uses (or, apparently, bandwidth). It still has a lot of promise, though.
Wouldn't it work better if they used a collection of crowd-sourced knowledge from these places to determine search result relevance?
Worked pretty well. Not google yet but i still like open and will use it.
That gets everybody's nose out of my search business.
Once again, free software forgoes immediate pronouncability and a name that would draw people in, instead opting for some weird (but clever and nerdy most likely) acronym that will not remain in people's minds.
...and start coding my ideas. First itunes, then fb and now p2p search. Just goes to show ideas are a dime a dozen its just who implements it first. Can't wait to see how this turns out though. P2P is really how the internet should be structured as much as possible.
$action = empty(PHP) ? backToC() : unset(PHP) ; "when the concrete cases are understood, the abstractions are readily
people won't like it if they don't know how to pronounce it.
I assumed it was intended to be pronounced like Yahtzee, which is both memorable and quite descriptive of the quality of results you can expect.
Disclaimer: Your search results will be tainted with the opinions of whatever country has their computers turned on at the moment...
Haven't we learned from gnutella, and the others, that this kind of thing just doesn't work? That it'll get overwhelmed by spam, hackers, you name it? I'll try it because I always try new p2p type stuff. But I'm really hoping they have a good security team.
This signature has Super Cow Powers
And they have made a terrible first impression. They never should have issued a press release touting their search demo page when their index is so terribly thin.
It reminds me of the launch of "cuil" which was another over-hyped disaster.
As a test, I searched for the word "trout" and got back 0 results. They didn't even return the wikipedia page for trout. In contrast, google claims to have 62,500,000 results for trout, although they never let you see more than 1000 results. However you can at least assume that google has given you the best 1000 pages out of the 62.5 million results in its index, whether or not you agree with their idea of what is "best".
Aside from all of the previously mentioned, and in my opinion insurmountable, problems with spammers downloading the code and modifying it to game the results, they have failed to make a good first impression, and their project is, for that and many other reasons, doomed to fail.
The darn thing is written on Java. Thats a big no go for me.
Another stupid name for an open source project. Getting really old.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
...is that they won't bow to censorship... oh wait...
So, I tried the portal and searched for slashdot.
1. geek.net ...
2. slashdot tags
3. ostg.com
4. slashdot.org/favicon.ico
main page nowhere to be seen.
Second try, antirely different results: ...
1. microsoft.slashdot.org
2. slashdot.org
Seems very erratic so far. Then maybe it needs some time to stabilize a bit.
Didn't find Facebook and it confused poor chrome into thinking it's German. No Thanks.
What about people who want to join but don't run their own compilers? You know, those people exist.
"As is often the case in the early stages of a new technology, results are better on some topics than on others -- mainly computer-related issues."
Uh, no. Google became a search juggernaut because it provided better results. Otherwise there would be no motivation to switch from Yahoo. And, since this solves a problem most people don't care about, it's doomed.
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
Oh my, Google is so dead. DEAD!
It'll be just like when Diaspora totally stomped Facebook!
With all the hate for eBay in the world, why hasn't an OSS replacement been done yet? I'm not saying it would be easy, but that it would be very well received.
... by the Harvest Project, which installed several local data collectors, and which then added a search engine over all those collectors. The cache system added in between is still known today: Squid.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvest_project
- Hubert
I imagine some corporate interest, perhaps do no evil Google, will come up with a copyright take down notice on the system. Add to that, but user derived content makes it vulnerable to special interests, like say, child porn advocates. This just sounds like a bad idea all the way round. Some kind of crowd sourced scoring would be needed to filter bad content. Not easy when the crowd grows to a million plus. Accurate, but unwieldy. I think I might wait for 2.0.
I'll take a pass and wait until they come out with a HURD port!
I installed the server on my machine and gave it a shot. I made very classical request such as the name of a couple universities, a couple famous website and made a few regular queries like "chocolate mousse recipe". None of the request actually pointed to something even remotely close to what I was looking for. I thought it might need some bootup time, so I tried again an hour later. It was not much better. Just much slower. I'll try again in a few day. But that does not look good...
On top of that it looks like there is no special ranking system, so I guess they take the order of reply or the number of occurences... most likely not good criteria...
GIMP is another example. Great free graphics program, terrible name.
Coming soon .. "Mosquito takes on lion"
I could go on, but you get the idea. I would really like to see a usable peer to peer search engine. The Internet needs it. Yacy is not it. The idea is good, the implementation can best be described as EPIC FAIL.
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
you need to know something that your network never heard of or doesn't know how to find. Like for example suppose you are looking for unprotected directories that contain .jpg files of both Jennifer Aniston and some obscure Flemish painter from the 18th century. The Google search box is all powerful in such situations. Or, to give another example, you are looking for papers relating to a particular topic in K Theory. Basically the Yacy approach is to go back to the good old days when me and my friends had pages online filled with links to other sites. If you were connected to a good network of links like that, then you sure could find just about anything quickly... but that was 1995.
if your life is such a big joke then why should I care?
I tried YaCy years ago when I first heard about it. I really like the idea, and it could work quite well in academic environments. And its great, because the Internet is inherently peer-to-peer, and if just enough of us get together we can make an excellent and totally peer-to-peer search engine right?
Wrong! Lets face it, the internet requires corporate and governmental control in order to work. If you can de-centralize the Internet away from major corporations and government influence, then I might devote my spare computing cycles to YaCy. But can a community of individuals really launch satellites, or maintain an under-sea cable that goes from Los Angeles to Tokyo?
The reason net neutrality and anti-trust regulations is so important is that we need government to make sure the Internet is free. If we don't, it will become what they want it to become -- just another propaganda tool, like what has happened in China. The anarchist in me loves the idea of YaCy, but we need functioning governments with truly protected free speech and true competition between corporations in order to for good search engines to emerge from market forces. Unfortunately, we have neither true competition, nor do we have true free speech. Google will suit me just fine for now.
I met with the project leader in FOSSASIA last year, and he's a very nice guy. I like the YaCy project, and even installed it on my laptop. But yet, I don't understand how this can be made news on Slashdot. The project is literally YEARS old. It's major flaw? Not enough peers. Last time I tried, there was hundreds of them, when it would really work if there was hundreds of thousands. Also, search is quite slow compared to google.
I downloaded it and gave it a try, but I'm going to stick with DuckDuckGo. In my experience the results have been as good as or better than Google and if I don't find what I'm looking for, it also gives links to do the search in Google or Bing.
Maybe not
Open source software has twelve different ways to do the same thing. Now there's already twelve ways to pronounce the name of this search engine. Way to go.
So, the first thing I saw, when I got to the page was a giant wall of text, followed by a video, saying *see it in action,* but there's no search box. Who's gonna search a page for the link at the top that says search portal, only to link to another page with another wall of text, with yet, another link? That link, while presenting a search box, is only a conceptual demonstration. I searched for the word, "popsicle" and got nothing even resembling a relationship with popsicles.
Technically impressive, not very practical.
Bing Is Not Google: BING.
There are a lot of criticisms here, but hey it's a start. I am convinced that p2p is essential to the future of the Internet being at all useful and for humanity moving towards freedom rather than tyranny. Decentralization needs to occur at every useful application. The huge challenge is that obviously decentralization will always (well almost always) be infinity less efficient. Hang in there.
Isn't http://www.commoncrawl.org/ better?
Slashdot = Sarcasm
You know, this looks very interesting actually. I wouldn't be so bold as to say that it's "taking on Google", but it's a great idea. For example, right now it looks like yacy.net is down (maybe because of us, btw) - but you can just install it on your own Linux-based machine and you can still search the network, heck there's even an apt repository.
From there you get your own search engine, which you can even use to only search your LAN or private network. You can not only use that to search the distributed database, but also crawl your own sites, to improve the results for your community.
Think about it: no more profiling of your searches, no more dependency on a central authority for results. More importantly, no more single point of failure for the collective knowledge of mankind. Seems to me like a good goal.
That is a pretty good start, I would say. Of course we shouldn't expect the results to be better or even close to Google's, but if we all jump in and help this project, this could become something decent.
Or we could just sit back in our usual armchair specialist posture and say it's all crap. This is slashdot after all...
Semantics is the gravity of abstraction
Spam isn't so much of an issue. Usability is. When I think back to gnutella I have fond memories of performing a search for something rare and waiting 5 or so seconds for the first hit to pop up and then 30 seconds later.
If you want to know the big difference between YaCy and Google, then Google it: "YaCy vs Google"
"About 992,000 results (0.27 seconds) "
YaCy? What a ridiculous name, use a normal name like Google.
l've been looking for a search engine, that when I enter "Integrity" , I don't get back "Buy Intergity".
No good results when searching for "porn"
If they want it to be successful and adopted by countless users, it should be given a non-geek name.
Went to the site, typed in a search, results sucked, back to google.
This is like Linux on the desktop, you'll struggle to get what you really want... when there's an alternative available that gives you what you want the first time without the struggle.
They appear to be in the "Slackware" on floppies stage, call me when they're in the "Mint" stage.
Awesome!
Come on guys YaCy has been around since ages. I remember playing with it in something like 2004-2005. This hardly classifies as something new. Yes it is distributed and yes it is easily influenced. Very easily. Not to mention the java crap it was (at least at the time i played with it).
In fire we trust http://www.getoto.net
I loaded YaCy on my Ubuntu box 2 days ago. Since then the number of links indexed have gone from less than 1 billion to 1.5 billion and rising. 65,000 of them are technical links I've crawled to get at the cost of about 750 MByte of download bandwidth. A lot of work has gone into YaCy and while it isn't perfect, I think it's a great start. It is open source and looking for people to help in it's development. Some of the critics here should stop complaining about what YaCy isn't andand try helping out with it.
Critics are like lemons - they grow on trees are common and are naturally bitter.
Doers are like diamonds - hard to find and very valuable.
#JustSaying.