[liberationtech] [p2p-hackers] WebRTC for in-browser P2P search engines

[piranna at gmail.com]

My P2P webapp ShareIt! has in-built search functionality, although it's
very naïve, just every peer has a copy of the index and search the dats
localy using lun.r, and currently the project itself it's being suffering a
major rewrite and doesn't work (but it did!!! :-D). I plan to use in the
future a more real distributed search engine, maybe DHT or sending search
requests to other peers so they only search on their local files and send
back the results.

Send from my Samsung Galaxy Note II
El 26/01/2014 10:35, "Jesse Taylor" <jessetaylor84 at riseup.net> escribió:

>   Hey folks --
>
> Recently, in light of the Snowden leaks, there has been a lot of focus on
> the importance of developing more secure alternatives to email, instant
> messaging, browsing, etc. ... but I've seen very little focus on the need
> for development of alternatives to corporate search engines.
>
> Corporate/state control of the Internet involves a three pronged strategy
> of: mass surveillance, censorship/criminalization of undesirable ideas, and
> traffic shaping (i.e. directing people away of things you don't want them
> to see, and towards things you do). Centralized corporate search engines
> such as Google are implicated in all three of these, i.e. they:
>
>    - Monitor what we are searching for
>    - Censor websites by removing them from search engine indexes
>    - Shape traffic via non-transparent algorithms that can sort search
>    results in a way that grants prominence to certain types of sites
>    (corporate media, etc.), in order to suit the interests of multinational
>    corporations and governments.
>
> ... so obviously, developing alternatives to corporate search is every bit
> as crucial for protecting privacy and free speech as encrypting our
> emails/chats, and anonymizing our browsing.
>
> But I've seen very little information about practical/simple options that
> are available for anonymous and decentralized Internet search engines. The
> few existing solutions like YaCy all seem overly complex (and thus unusable
> to most users) and require downloading a standalone application to use.
> These standalone P2P search applications don't really make sense from a
> usability perspective. It's unrealistic to expect hundreds of millions of
> users to download a standalone Java app, and configure a P2P index node
> (especially when configuration is as complex as it is for Yacy).
>
> It seems to me that it would make more sense to use protocols like WebRTC<http://www.webrtc.org/>to facilitate P2P connectivity in the web browser, so that the searching
> and indexing can be done via a simple browser plugin that can be installed
> by anyone with one-click. This would simplify indexing (e.g. just use the
> bookmarks/recent sites visited by default, rather than forcing users
> manually configure it), and would allow people to just use the browser
> search bar as usual. There would still likely need to be some sort of
> standalone signaling/tracker servers set up to bootstrap search/index nodes
> into the P2P network, but most of the work -- i.e. all of the indexing,
> searching, routing, etc. -- would be done by the nodes using the browser
> extension. And almost all of the complexity would be hidden from the
> average user. If P2P search could be simplified in this manner, I feel that
> the adoption would be much more rapid than if P2P search is based on
> complex standalone apps.
>
> I have been unable to find anyone who is working on this right now (i.e. a
> WebRTC-based P2P search engine), so I'm trying to figure out what would be
> needed to make this happen, or if there are things that I'm not aware of
> that make this infeasible. I definitely plan to start coding something
> later this year when I have the time, but right now I can't take this on,
> and wanted throw the idea out so that someone who does can take it and run
> with it ...
>
> Thoughts? Do any of you see this being useful? What are some of the
> problems/limitations you see arising with WebRTC based P2P search? What
> tools would you suggest for getting this implemented in a browser
> extension? ...
>
> --Jesse Taylor <http://www.interference.cc>
>
>
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>
>
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