The P2P network approach here is important for two reasons, one is that I do not have fulltext access to journals and researchers using this extension do, and s

The P2P network approach here is important for two reasons, one is that I do not have fulltext access to journals and researchers using this extension do, and second, I do not have the resources to run a centralized search engine, which would be expensive, as you say, because of index/server costs. The fact that it's an unproven concept is exciting to me; that and the fact that it's using very modern technologies to solve an existing problem. If nothing else, maybe this project can server as a cool demo for the underlying tech, i.e. WebRTC. To my knowledge it is the only keyword-base search engine based entirely in the browser. I agree with your remark about Google, I was trying to be witty but often my humor fails me, as my family and friend will be eager to confirm :) Given that Google doesn't have public APIs, even paid ones, for any of their search services, leads me to believe the numbers just don't add up for them. With regards to angering publishers: I really really do not want to come on their bad side, and I can't see how this project could. It's mission is to help users discover content that they have, help them find the right papers, which are still hosted by publishers. Never will Scholar Ninja be used to circumvent paywalls or share paywalled fulltext papers, this is just not in anyone's interest. Scholar Ninja only indexes pages you read anyway, so it doesn't cause any additional load on servers, and it only contains keyword references to documents, e.g. "cancer": ["10.1371/journal.pmed.0010065", ...], which enables us to do keyword searching.