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."

Comments

Re:Well

[HFShadow]

This has been solved by distributed computing a long time ago, you simply get more than on worker to check the results and if anything looks fishy chuck away everything from that worker.

Not that this makes this any better of an idea.

In 1996 this was done ...

[hubertf]

... 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

Re:Java...

[Nimey]

...instead, you have to update the JRE about that often because of sloppy programming leading to arbitrary remote code execution vulnerabilities.

The JRE is currently the #1 malware vector, even above Flash and Acrobat.