Researchers Propose a Decentralized Search Engine Built on Ethereum and IPFS
A number of new technologies make it possible to combine the creation of a decentralized network where privacy is possible and censorship is difficult. Jeff Kaplan of the Internet Archive call to create a decentralized website (dweb). While the Internet on which the Web is built is decentralized, the Web itself is centralized.
"A particular website has only one physical location. Therefore, if the hardware in this location is down, no one can see this site. In this way, the web is centralized: if someone controls the material of a website or the line of communication to a website, then he or she controls all uses of that website. I suggest we need a bold goal, one that is understandable and achievable. Something that we might be able to rally around, and have multiple groups contribute to, in order to build an easy to use Distributed Web.”
Google might not directly be in sight, but many now think the global giant has far too much power over human knowledge, and as all know, power corrupts. They could for example, perhaps without anyone noticing, remove billions of pages from their index. If they are doing so more subtly, would anyone know ? That’s just one of many problems with monopoly like centralized services, which in part are a product of a centralized web structure.
QueenBee is the first initiative in the world to create a decentralized search engine on DWeb. Hong Kong researchers believe that research can also be done on the ethereum. They describe the design as follows :
"Queen-Bee encourages content creators to publish, create, or update their content through QueenBee's intelligent contract to earn honey in the form of cryptocurrency. Honey is also rewarded by peer bees that help update the index and calculate the ranks of pages, which are hosted in a decentralized storage for example, IPFS. Users submit their keyword queries via the QueenBee HTML + Javascript interface on DWeb. The client is also responsible for composing the search results by crossing the corresponding reverse listings, ranking the results and displaying the relevant ads."
QueenBee is a decentralized organization. Advertisers advertise directly through our smart contract and advertising revenue is shared between content creators and worker bees. The decentralized nature of QueenBee gets rid of the problems encountered in centralized search engines.
