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The world of P2P search engines is not crowded at all, the only projects that reached a consistent user base are:
YaCy at this time is the only P2P search engine with a consistent user base. It runs as a stand-alone cross-platform appliance and provides a crawler, indexing, storage and a web-based UI. Some users complain about the fact YaCy is written in Java, and push for a complete rewriting with a lower level (C/C++) or a more modern (Go, Rust, Python) language. Complaints emerged also about the UI, which is perceived somehow clumsy and confused. Some issues emerged also when trying to run it on relatively constrained device like RPi2.
PROS:
- fully distributed
- has a crawler
- not limited to web resources
- privacy and anonymity efforts
CONS:
- limited results on the web (no fallback on classic search engines)
- easily gets resource hungry
- browser integration not up-to-date
FAROO, now discontinued, was a quite well known P2P search engine. It was based on a freeware Windows application. Since it was never open sourced there is little knowledge of its internals, but one of the peculiarity was the ability to customize search and ranking according to users habits (frequency of visits, time spent on page etc.). Some privacy-concerns emerged regarding what the company was collecting from users and how it was used, and discouraged its adoption.
PROS:
- No central server
- Has social features
- Leverage users habits
CONS:
- closed source
- privacy concerns
- discontinued
There is a variety of search engines, both commercial and open-source, that despite their centralized approach, are focused on user privacy. Main examples are:
SearX is an open source search engine that could be either consulted through its website or installed on self hosted to run as a stand alone (private) search engine. Unluckily, when used on the internet, being basically a broker for google and other search engines results, we found it unable to provide valuable content, due to API errors from Google and others.
PROS:
- could be self-hosted
CONS:
- searches sometimes are not successful
- centralized design
DuckDuckGo is a "classic" search engine which is committed to provide users with unbiased results and privacy. This policy is not enforced by design choices in the engine architecture, but relies solely on DuckDuckGo will (which some paranoid users seem not to trust entirely)
minedive aims to leverage the progress made by existing NGIZero projects and bring their achievements inside ours. We believe NGIZero ecosystem will greatly improve the level of collaboration between Open-source projects in the same areas, heading to solutions deeply rooted inside the community.
librarian plans to make a network of federated search brokers. Users run a broker on their own computer using a browser plugin. In this architecture the broker can safely analyze the user's behaviour to improve search results as the data is accumulated on a per-user basis on disconnected computers. This approach is somehow similar to that of minedive, but we are not aware of the way it is addressing privacy and anonymity concerns.
The project aims to develop a secure and reliable decentralized storage platform enabling fast and scalable content search and lookup going beyond existing approaches. The goal is to leverage the path-awareness features of the SCION Internet architecture to use network resources efficiently in order to achieve a low search and lookup delay while increasing the overall throughput. The challenge is to select suitable paths considering those performance requirements, and potentially combining them into a multi-path connection. Aim is to design and implement optimal path selection and data placement strategies for a decentralized storage system. We think the outcome of this project could be very beneficial to the way minedive stores and shares information among peers
The project will implement a system that allows such isolated networks to also provide search and advertising capabilities, making it easier to find local services, and ensuring that local enterprises can promote their services to members of their communities, without requiring the loss of capital from their communities in the form of advertising costs. The project will then trial this system with a number of pilot communities, in order to learn how to make such a system best serve its purpose. We are not interested in commercial exploitation (advertising) of minedive, but finding out how this project works at network level could be beneficial for minedive.
SearX engines are very valuable for minedive in order to find out how to get results from a wide variety of existing search engines, in order to use them as fallback results in our project.
Mynij believes that Web search will eventually run offline for legal, technical and economic rationale. This is why it is building a general purpose Web search engine that runs offline and fits into a smartphone. It can provide fast results with better accuracy than online search engines. It protects privacy and freedom of expression against recent forms of digital censorship. It reduces the cost of online advertising for small businesses. It brings search algorithms and information presentation under end-user control. And you control its availability: as long as you have a copy and a working device, it can work. We share the worries exposed by Mynij and think efficient offline storage might be a good solution to preserve net freedom and neautrality.
Sonar is a project to research and build a toolkit for decentralized search. The project will provide a library that allows to create, share, and query search indexes, that we could possibly integrate inside minedive. One of their aim is to also provide users with machine learning powered ranking, and we are very interested in finding out how this will be addressed.