There is no one search engine in OpenBazaar, that's the beauty of it. Anyone can run a search service returning results that people can see in the client themselves.

Our company (OB1) runs one service, and we do censor those listings and allow people to report illegal or offensive listings. However there are other search engines that choose to censor lightly or not at all, and everyone is free to use whichever search providers (or a combination) that they want.

I'm not super familiar with ipfs, is that sufficient to cover yourself legally speaking? Does the company host any server nodes itself?

We have some bootstrap nodes and some data nodes to help provide redundancy on the network. We can control what content we serve from those nodes. I'm not a lawyer and can't speak to legal concerns.

Currently we have federated search, like BitTorrent, except we have a public standard[1] for allowing anybody to create a search engine that plugs into the client. Every search engine has their own policies and methods for moderation. It's similar to choosing between Google and DDG in your browser.

[1] https://github.com/OpenBazaar/obips/blob/master/obip-0002.md

So if you run an open bazaar server, do you have any control over what content gets federated to your node?

In the case of BitTorrent, you are only serving up what you have specifically downloaded.

So how do you federate the market listings without turning unwitting users into felons?

This isn't a push network, you only cache and rehost the data that you have requested (by visiting another user's page). And if you visit something you don't want to rehost then you can clear the cache.

So yes, users have complete control over what content they are serving.

I don't know how this is implemented in UI's but it seems that this rehosting occurs too easily.

If you visit someone's page and then.. oops its inappropriate.. I have to take quick action now before I get sued (and its easy to make mistakes and overlook something)

I'd rather have an explicit opt-in button 'Rehost' (or something) than having to opt-out by clearing the cache.

Or is this easily configurable already?

Just like you described for BitTorrent. Your node only downloads and serves things you have explicitly downloaded/viewed. You can purge that data if you want but not yet remove only specific content.

the way you describe this (i.e. 'viewed') sounds like an opt-out feature, not an explicit opt-in..