Nathan Staudt based in the UK, pinged me to let us know about a p2p search engine. Of course, why had i not noticed any alternative search technologies, especially with different architectural approaches? Apparently this project has existed a long time already and i always feel sympathy as well fearful, when pitted against the obvious incumbents. After a bit of research it appears there are hundreds of search projects that cater to many different information areas, so plenty of space for growth.

I’m working on a project to bring peer to peer (p2p) web search to the public. I feel that p2p search is an important way to help prevent the censorship of internet search results. Read more here.

I would appreciate it if you would consider running an article about peer-search.net – it’s a unique search client (notice I say “client” and not “engine”) where the user’s search will never be sent to a single point of control (not even the peer-search.net website!) – instead, each visitor’s browser talks to random parts of the YaCy p2p network directly.

YaCy is a p2p network that works to index the internet (instead of sharing files like p2p networks are more famous for doing). The p2p nature of YaCy means that even if you attempted to modify an instance of YaCy to ignore sites that contain a particular phrase etc, then the other instances will continue and will find that content anyway. Likewise, when providing search results, the computers in the network work together to produce results so “bad” nodes fail to significantly impact the results the user receives. YaCy has grown steadily since its inception in 2006 and is now a stable, scalable, tamper resistant p2p network which currently provides an index to over a billion documents.

Please try out a few searches on peer-search.net and let me know what you think – it’s not Google, but then it’s still smaller than Google.
See my opinions on that particular topic (scaling) and why I’m creating peer-search.net here