Free Software-like equivalents of Google?

Now Google is in the news, and "threatens" to engulf the entire world
and become the next Microsoft.

Just as Linux is competing with Microsoft and is checking its threat, it
may be a good idea to have something, which competes with Google.

Google is based upon a worldwide network of servers (several of them in
physical proximity to each other).  Free Software has been used to build
cooperating networks of computers for several years (FidoNet, UUCP, the
TCP/IP suite itself upon which the Internet is based, various grid
computing platforms).  So it should not be an insurmountable obstacle to
develop software for cooperating information servers.

It may be a good idea to implement the following Free Software projects:

1. "Holographic" database - database which is distributed among a
network of cooperating computers, in such a way that no single missing
computer would cause data to be inaccessible.  (When one speaks about
search engine results, it is acceptable to lose data about low-ranking
Web pages.)
Such a database would allow people to assemble gigantic databases and
store them in several cooperating computers over the Internet - at
reasonable cost.

2. Distributed Web spider network - a network of coordinated spiders,
which traverse the WWW and feed an holographic network with analysis of
the Web pages accessed.

3. Distributed search engine - which receives search requests and knows
to dispatch them to few database computers and get results.
In the past, there used to be some Web sites, which allowed you to
submit a query to few search engines in parallel.  Then the results of
those searches were combined and presented to you.  The same principle
could be used now.

Then go on and reimplement other Google services (except perhaps for
revenue-generating services) on the same platform.
                                                --- Omer
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