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

Well

[Anonymous Coward]

Result: Search results will be controlled by botnets

Re:Well

[Intron]

Result: Search results will be controlled by botnets

Yes. What's to stop me from downloading the code, modifying it to put my results on top and then joining my 1000 or so servers to the pool? You only need a small advantage to get big differences in results -- the difference between 10th and 11th place is page one vs obscurity.

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.

Re:Well

[Hazel Bergeron]

The great thing about centralised search engines is that they're not gamed... oh wait...

...is that it isn't in the provider's interest to encourage spam domains full of adverts brokered by itself... oh wait...

...is that there's careful control over dissemination of information so privacy is not compromised... oh wait...

A p2p search engine will have different problems. But in the limit perhaps it'll be like a load of Google or whatever servers sitting around the Internet instead of in one or two datacentres.

Re:Well

[Rei]

The whole "portal only as an afterthought demo" seems to me a huge flaw as well. You think your average person is going to install this on their computer just so they can do web searches? Not-going-to-happen. People who want to run it, will. People who don't or don't know how, won't. They're the 99.99%. They need a portal. Clients should automatically be putting themselves in the portal-switching queue.

As for the capabilities, I just tried it out. The results are *extremely* few and very poor. "Dog" gets five hits, for example. You'd almost think it was a joke. Hopefully this was a load problem or a problem due to a lack of scaling in the system thusfar, and not a design flaw.

At least their frontend doesn't seem designed with injection in mind. Start off a search with ' (such as 'Test) and watch what happens to the peer listed at the bottom of the page. I doubt that particular issue is exploitable, but if this a habit of one of their coders...

Re:Well

[Rei]

Instead of insight, comment contained bobcat. Would not read again.
 

Re:Well

[alexgieg]

This system probably solves spam the same way Freenet managed to eliminate it from its boards: by adopting a(n anonymous) Web Of Trust model. In practice, you'll only see results coming from those you trust directly or indirectly. The fake results will be there, but buried.

And even if they currently don't do that due to the smallness of the network, at some point they will. It's unavoidable.

Although the problem then might become you only seeing what you like because your friends/trusted nodes all think more or less the same, hence basically shielding yourself from different views. But then, mainstream search engines already do something like this, so it won't be that different from what we already have.

Re:Well

[blackraven14250]

If it were in Google's interest to bump spam domains to the top, it wouldn't be the useful search engine with leading market share that it is today, as it would have already bumped said results.

Re:Well

[M. Baranczak]

Freenet solves the spam problem by ensuring that nobody actually uses Freenet. I think this project will apply the same solution.

This scheme has pretty slim chances of success. Which doesn't necessarily mean it shouldn't be attempted.

Great

[Moheeheeko]

Only used by neckbeards = all search results will be tentacle hentai and open source software websites.

Awesome...

Re:Great

[datavirtue]

Dude, that would be an awesome search engine name: neckbeard. Catchy and meaningful, easy to remember.

Ummm

[Webs 101]

Yahoo's search engine IS Bing.

Come FLOSS Devs, We Need Better Names!

[DMFNR]

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.

Re:Come FLOSS Devs, We Need Better Names!

[markdavis]

+1 Mod parent up.

Seems the geeky crowd still doesn't understand that marketing DOES play a critical role in the popularity of any type of project. "YaCy" really does suck- it is impossible to say, isn't a word, introduces strange capitalization, and it is not even easy to remember.

Re:Come FLOSS Devs, We Need Better Names!

[adolf]

Seems the geeky crowd still doesn't understand that marketing DOES play a critical role in the popularity of any type of project. "YaCy" really does suck- it is impossible to say, isn't a word, introduces strange capitalization, and it is not even easy to remember.

So fork it, changing only the name, and release it yourself under a more marketable moniker. The technical aspects of doing this are easy.

And if you think selecting a catchy, unencumbered name is also easy, then you really shouldn't have any problem pulling it off.

It's all GPL, so you can pretty much do what you want with it. If you really want to be in charge of marketing and distribution for a GPL project, the only thing stopping you is you.

Re:Come FLOSS Devs, We Need Better Names!

[raftpeople]

Other names they considered that were equally bad:
1) FreEble
2) !!_//[%%%
3) Bing
3) xkCQQT

Cool, but what's in it for the peers?

[91degrees]

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?

Re:Cool, but what's in it for the peers?

[TheRaven64]

I sketched out a few designs for a decentralised search engine (but didn't implement them, so kudos to these guys for actually bothering), and one of the ideas I had was to allow nodes to return sponsored links (e.g. Amazon referrals). The client would display these for the top few nodes and track the reputations of individual peers. The more users who liked the search results that you returned, the more of them would see your sponsored links. If you came up with a ranking algorithm that did a better job than existing ones, then you'd get a bigger slice of the advertising space. It's essentially the same business model as Google, just on a smaller scale.

Java...

[HBI]

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.

Re:Java...

[vadim_t]

Ugh, yeah. Another cool project is going to be held back by Java.

Way back, this happened with Freenet. I thought it was a cool idea, but the darn thing wasn't happy with all the 256MB I could give it. Even now, Java is still a considerable load on laptops with 4GB RAM.

I think that for best adoption they should have concentrated on making it small and light. If it can be run in say, 64MB RAM then you can install it anywhere. And it's quite likely that a good part of why Freenet was so horrible when I tried it, is because it made a lot of the machines it ran on swap like crazy.

Re:Java...

[HBI]

I'd be interested in porting it to C, actually.

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.

No control over disk usage

[markdavis]

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.

Re:No control over disk usage

[nurb432]

Run it in a VM. limit its disk space and networking in one fell swoop.

Re:No control over disk usage

[Meski]

I'd wonder about what readable or easily decodable data might be found on your local drive. Do you think telling the authorities that raid your computer that you aren't responsible for illicit content (think about it doing something like google cache on a pron site) or url's to sites the government disapproves of etc, is going to be believable?

Got to get off my lazy butt...

[xTantrum]

...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.

Yahtzee

[pavon]

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.

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

GIMP is another example. Great program

[Anonymous Coward]

GIMP is another example. Great free graphics program, terrible name.

Re:Also

[Enderandrew]

Google actively fought censorship in China more than any company on the planet. They put servers in Hong Kong that weren't required to censor results, and any page that was censored, Google made sure to state explicitly on the page that the content was censored so that people knew it.

In the end, China changed their laws and forced Google to comply. At that point they either had to pull out of China completely, or comply with laws. While some would contend that the high road is to pull out of China, but at the same time, you can't make in roads and try to effect change if you're not in the country at all.