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I can't answer for pfraze, but I've thought about this a lot. For one, even right now we badly need better client-side ways of caching, searching and indexing
by macawfish 9y ago
I can't answer for pfraze, but I've thought about this a lot.
For one, even right now we badly need better client-side ways of caching, searching and indexing content. I should be able to easily cache, tag and search a wikipedia article, for example, without ever touching a remote server. On the decentralized web, these tools are critical.
As far as search goes, it'd be interesting to find a way of letting peers run anonymous queries on each others' local indices. Maybe you'd still only want trusted peers (e.g. friends of friends) to be able to query your index. Or maybe you'd want to have some privacy settings for who can search what content. Maybe this is a job for zero knowledge proofs? IDK. It's a hard problem for me to wrap my head around. How to balance privacy with fluid information retrieval.
This kind of p2p search system could be a powerful replacement of centralized search, especially in the sense that it gives users the opportunity to index content with humanly meaningful metadata.
Remember back in the day when people had web indexes? You'd visit someone's www page and they'd have a list of cool links? Think about a next level version of that, where peoples' curated indexes are stacked with meaningful metadata and well integrated with the browser.
I could also imagine interesting peer-graph indexing algorithms that worked using gather-apply-scatter kind of techniques.