Re: Free Software-like equivalents of Google?

On 11/7/05, Omer Zak <omerz-ysDPMY98cNQDDBjDh4tngg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> 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.

When there is no single entity governing those databases, and they
will become popular, eventually commercial enterprises will start
thinking up ways of making money off these databases, and subvert the
integrity mechanisms that those databases have.

They are trying to do it to Google today, and there's every reason to
believe that they will try to do it to your futuristic distributed
search engine. You could battle it with integrity algorithms and
reputation systems, but as we all painfully know, a net of millions of
zombies can subvert a reputation system.

While I don't like shooting your idea down, how do you propose the
system can be made resilient to the huge economic pressure that a
system in that order of magnitude will inevitably attract?

-- Arik


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