

FSF Europe launches peer-to-peer search engine - jfruh
http://www.itworld.com/software/228393/free-software-activists-take-google-new-free-search-engine

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jshen
I like the idea, but I think a p2p search should also include human filtering
and trust. I.e. i know the keys of my trusted friends and sites/pages they've
"approved" rank higher for my searches.

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nmridul
Once you implement this, there would be lots of privacy concerns. But when
done by smaller company / non-commercial entities, the concerns might be
lesser.

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JulianMorrison
Um, am I alone in getting a sinking feeling that the word "security" appears
only in one place on their site, and it's in regard to having your searches
snooped? Hint to FSF: not everyone on the web is an altruist.

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JoshTriplett
I tried a few test searches, and didn't seem to get many useful results at
all. Searching for [debian] did not produce any debian.org results anywhere on
the first page. Similarly, searching for [google] did not produce google.com
(or any other google domain) on the first page. Searching for [lwn] produced
one random LWN comment, but nothing else. Searching for [linux] produced a
page full of links to the Wikipedia articles on Linux in numerous different
languages, in no sensible order.

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mark_l_watson
Interesting code base. Java with a templating engine
(de.anomic.server.serverObjects) I have never seen before. Worth some reading
time.

Bigger picture: YaCy would need to reach a large critical mass of nodes before
being useful, so it would seem to be difficult to get enough people to donate
server resources.

Also, it is not clear how to keep anyone from doing SEO by running nodes that
make it a priority to spider promoted web sites.

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jshen
What if it indexed your bookmarks. I'd find that very useful.

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xorglorb
Well, it sounds cool, but the first result for "Google" is a Youtube Video
Converter, and it appears to randomly change between German and English.

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nmridul
Is there a way they check the validity of every peer database ? What if I edit
the index in my computer so that my website comes at top of the result for
high competing terms (similar to google link bombing) ? And if I can lease
100s of computers, then I would be first on the result ...

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andrewflnr
So this spreads the index across all nodes, right? I probably don't want an
index of the entire web on my hard drive. But at the same time, how efficient
can it be to hit a bunch of different nodes every time I search? How is it
going to affect me when people hit my node?

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pyre
I imagine that nodes could be classified as cache-only, storage-only, or
cache-and-storage.

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runn1ng
I downloaded the peer software... how do I know to how many peers I am
connected, how do I know what does my computer actually do, and why does
"local" yacy returns 0 results to everything?

Questions, questions, questions.

