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I mean, how do you verify nodes are being honest and not just sending fake data for the free crypto (like what happened with seti@home and there wasn't even mon

I mean, how do you verify nodes are being honest and not just sending fake data for the free crypto (like what happened with seti@home and there wasn't even money involved) Not to mention, where is the value of this coin going to come from? Will people pay to use this search engine? That seems unlikely. It doesn't sound like the perfect use case to me.

px43 3y ago
By ignoring cryptocurrencies, you've missed out on over 10 years of progress in this space. We have things like zero knowledge notaries and data availability sampling proofs. Actively Validated Services are also a thing. Service providers stake some asset, and interested parties can challenge them at certain intervals to ensure that they are properly performing their duties. Through the magic of Merkel Trees, and soon Verkel Trees (basically Merkel tress, but using vector commitments for super fast proofs) challengers can demand that that service providers generate a proof that some data they hold matches some criteria. The nice thing about it is that because it's a zero knowledge proof, the challenger doesn't even need to know what that data is, and what they get back is a succinct proof that they can check very quickly, basically like checking an md5 some for execution correctness. It's cool shit, you should really look into it.
worksonmine 3y ago
That's exactly why blockchain is a good choice. You verify that whatever X sends matches what Y and Z would send before any reward is received. Based on the shared index every query should return the same results, kids stuff really. The monetization is a nut to crack yes, but Kagi works as a paywalled search engine. Otherwise just serve ads like all the rest already do? Tried and proven model, and in this solution they could be very transparent as there's no corporation behind trying to dupe the users for clicks to maximize profits. I even see the possibility for a hybrid model, don't like ads? Pay for the compute with your own coins. The value comes from the network, trust and use-case. It doesn't have to be a new coin.
numpad0 3y ago
Agreed; feels to me that people here is underestimating malice on the Internet. Simple crypto-based search credit system will be overtaken with fake queries and fake data. I'm not entirely confident that crypto-like reward mechanisms for distributed search is fundamentally flawed and unusable, but both the problem and solution needs to be refined a bit more.
- worksonmine 3y ago
  > Agreed; feels to me that people here is underestimating malice on the Internet. I don't think we do. We just prefer to put our trust in algorithms and verifiable data sources. It's not like Google et al are the pinnacle of altruism, there have been cases where the promoted results are faked copies of the actual site you want to visit, fooling less computer savvy users to install malware. The trust is put into the code, same principle as reproducible builds. It doesn't matter where you get the source, as long as the checksum matches. This way the censor side of the problem is solved. That leaves the spam, which isn't really solved by the big corporations either. Last time I used google I got 2-3 pages of the same auto-generated bullshit on every technical search term I tried. This could be fixed by having the main index limited to trusted sites at the expense of discovering new content. The latter can be handled by opt-in indexes. If the goal is to index everything users could have their own filters for sites they don't want. If you really want to spice it up allow me to maintain my own query function (dangerous and potential exploit yes) that I send to the nodes and I can handle my own ranking. There's nothing that makes a distributed index more unsafe than one run by Google. If every query picks 2 random nodes and compares the results I would trust that query more than current Google execs opinions of what I'm allowed to see.

px43 3y ago

By ignoring cryptocurrencies, you've missed out on over 10 years of progress in this space. We have things like zero knowledge notaries and data availability sampling proofs. Actively Validated Services are also a thing. Service providers stake some asset, and interested parties can challenge them at certain intervals to ensure that they are properly performing their duties. Through the magic of Merkel Trees, and soon Verkel Trees (basically Merkel tress, but using vector commitments for super fast proofs) challengers can demand that that service providers generate a proof that some data they hold matches some criteria. The nice thing about it is that because it's a zero knowledge proof, the challenger doesn't even need to know what that data is, and what they get back is a succinct proof that they can check very quickly, basically like checking an md5 some for execution correctness. It's cool shit, you should really look into it.

worksonmine 3y ago

That's exactly why blockchain is a good choice. You verify that whatever X sends matches what Y and Z would send before any reward is received. Based on the shared index every query should return the same results, kids stuff really. The monetization is a nut to crack yes, but Kagi works as a paywalled search engine. Otherwise just serve ads like all the rest already do? Tried and proven model, and in this solution they could be very transparent as there's no corporation behind trying to dupe the users for clicks to maximize profits. I even see the possibility for a hybrid model, don't like ads? Pay for the compute with your own coins. The value comes from the network, trust and use-case. It doesn't have to be a new coin.

numpad0 3y ago

Agreed; feels to me that people here is underestimating malice on the Internet. Simple crypto-based search credit system will be overtaken with fake queries and fake data. I'm not entirely confident that crypto-like reward mechanisms for distributed search is fundamentally flawed and unusable, but both the problem and solution needs to be refined a bit more.

worksonmine 3y ago
> Agreed; feels to me that people here is underestimating malice on the Internet. I don't think we do. We just prefer to put our trust in algorithms and verifiable data sources. It's not like Google et al are the pinnacle of altruism, there have been cases where the promoted results are faked copies of the actual site you want to visit, fooling less computer savvy users to install malware. The trust is put into the code, same principle as reproducible builds. It doesn't matter where you get the source, as long as the checksum matches. This way the censor side of the problem is solved. That leaves the spam, which isn't really solved by the big corporations either. Last time I used google I got 2-3 pages of the same auto-generated bullshit on every technical search term I tried. This could be fixed by having the main index limited to trusted sites at the expense of discovering new content. The latter can be handled by opt-in indexes. If the goal is to index everything users could have their own filters for sites they don't want. If you really want to spice it up allow me to maintain my own query function (dangerous and potential exploit yes) that I send to the nodes and I can handle my own ranking. There's nothing that makes a distributed index more unsafe than one run by Google. If every query picks 2 random nodes and compares the results I would trust that query more than current Google execs opinions of what I'm allowed to see.