A search engine via ethereum is not going to scale, is not easily upgraded, and will fall far short of any properly centralized search engine. If you want a competitve decentralized search engine, you're going to need a different technology.
Re:IPFS is the Distributed Web
by traverseda on Sunday October 23, 2016 @01:44PM
(#12774504)
I think that's why they talk about homomorphic encryption.
Homomorphic encryption as best I'm aware is more than a decade away from practical use. I believe the best libraries today have blowups of 100,000,000x in resource usage, meaning it's not even practical for basic crypto operations.
Multiparty computation makes some security sacrifices (breaks if M out of N people cheat, breaks undetectably iirc), but I think the blowup is less than 10x for some operations and less than 1000x for the others.
Still not pretty, but at least makes certain things possible. But not competitive search engines.
Re:IPFS is the Distributed Web
by drivingmenuts on Sunday October 23, 2016 @02:54PM
(#12774838)
Does the issue of digital-currency volatility apply?
If you're hosting content at a certain rate, then the rate drops so that it's less profitable or no longer profitable, wouldn't the proper strategy be to drop that content and then find something worth hosting?
Re:IPFS is the Distributed Web
by traverseda on Sunday October 23, 2016 @01:43PM
(#12774500)
It's a pity that ether seems to really want to make their own file layer, and IPFS seems to really want to make their own coin for dns.
The idea is that we run that centralized search engine via Smart Contracts.
In other words, using a decentralized currency such as Bitcoin and decentralized execution environment like Ethereum, we create softwares which pays people for providing CPU time and disk space (facilitated by IPFS).
Few missing pieces of this puzzle are homomorphic encryption implemented on Smart Contracts level which will allow that CPU service.
Once that's done then we can have the distributed web of the next level.