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

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.

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.

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:No control over disk usage

[nurb432]

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

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.