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minedive is a browser extension aiming to allow users to search the web while preserving their anonymity and privacy. It comes with an opensource reference implementation of its rendez-vous server.
minedive instances connect each-other (via WebRTC data channels) forming, conceptually, a 2 layers P2P network. The lower layer (L1) is formed by actual webRTC connections and provides routing, the upper layer (L2) provides anonymous and encrypted communication among peers acting as a MIX network. This architecture guarantees that peers which know your IP address (L1) do not know search data for (L2) and vice-versa.
A central (websocket) rendez-vous server is needed to find and connect with L1 peers, and to exchange keys with L2 peers, but no search goes through it. We are running a default server which can be overridden by users who want to run their own (using our reference implementation or a custom one).
TODO: Users can also set the extension to pick peers from a given community (identified by an opaque tag).
While currently all requests are satisfied by letting L2 peers return results from the 1st page of mainstream search engines (as they see it, in an attempt to escape the search bubble), and this will stay as a fallback, we plan for the future to implement web crawling on peers, doing keyword extraction from URLs in local bookmarks and history and ranking with open algorithms, being transparent with users about which techniques are used and open to suggestions.