apxhard

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Building a new Web Search Engine. Just for you, Stackers!

brugeman

Is it possible to build this as a totally decentralized project running on LN rather than as a single centralized site?

Lightning nodes could all host and expose 'indices', which could link to each other.

You could imagine people competing to run the best index on various topics (i.e. a jazz index, a beer index, a scifi index, etc), and then various 'metaindices' competing to store indices of indices.

So when you did a search, your own local node would consult its index and the index of everyone you were connected to, etc.  People could add or drop nodes that gave results they did, or didn't like. Censorship would become basically impossible, and the search engine would learn people's preferences over time, locally, on your own machine. Personalization without surveillance.


API requests could contain tiny lightning invoices for payment, and API operates could decide what sort of payment they requested. 

I should think it wouldn't be too hard to build a lightning-powered napster clone. This could be a killer app for LN; if you can find any content anywhere, download it fast, and get paid for hosting desired content, that would be a great reason to get more people using LN.

I think what you'd need are:
1) some means of serving files for sats, and i'm pretty sure this already exists
2) a way for nodes to advertise what kind of files they have for sale
3) a way for nodes to find each other

I think you could combine 2+3 together with something like an 'index' hosted on each node.   Nodes could link to other indices that they knew of.  Linking these indices together would make the entire lightning network _also_ a decentralized search engine.


You could imagine people competing to run the best index on various topics (i.e. a jazz index, a beer index, a scifi index, etc), and then various 'metaindices' competing to store indices of indices.

So if you if you search for, say, "steamboat willie",  your node would look for a copy of the file locally. Not finding that, it would go out to its peer indices and say, 'hey, do you know where something matching this name is?"

I'm a software engineer and i've looked into this a bit. Was considering building it as an umbrel app but i'm wondering if there's a better way to do this. Thoughts? Questions? Comments? Criticisms?