YaCy: A peer-to-peer search engine

Posted Dec 8, 2011 6:01 UTC (Thu) by gdt (subscriber, #6284)
Parent article: YaCy: A peer-to-peer search engine

If the program was made more friendly to ISPs then many would be willing to run the harvester for their network and peered networks. Own and peered traffic can be made free by running the harvester outside of peak usage periods.

The major change would be to bias the DHT based upon BGP attributes (community, AS Path length) so that the traffic on transit links is minimised.

Importantly, although ISPs would be happy to run one harvester they would be unhappy to run a second. So there would need to be some interoperable data or search for other FOSS search engines to use.

It would be well worth the authors' time to design an offering to ISPs and to contact the NANOG organisers to give a presentation.

Many ISPs would be delighted to assist a FOSS search engine purely to make a small breach in the current oligopoly, a market situation which carries risks even for the largest ISPs. ISPs are particularly FOSS-friendly, with a long Unix heritage and Linux heavily used and deeply understood. Many directly assist the FOSS community by running software mirrors.