The World Wide Web is on the brink of a new stage of development called Web 3. This revolutionary concept of online interaction will require an overhaul of the entire Internet infrastructure, including search engines. How does a decentralized search engine work and how is it fundamentally different from today’s search engines like Google? As an example, let’s take a look at a decentralized search engine for Web3 that was created by the Cyber project.
What’s wrong with Google?
Google is the most widely used search engine in the world. It accounts for around 80% of global search queries, but is often criticized for its opaque way of indexing links and driving search results. While descriptions of much of the technology related to its search algorithm have been published and are publicly available, that doesn’t change much for an end user trying to figure out how it works: the number of parameters taken. factored into producing results is so large that Google’s search algorithm just appears to be a black box.
In practice, ordinary users face two basic problems. First, two different users making the exact same query will often receive drastically different search results. Indeed, Google has managed to collect a treasure of data on its users and adjusts its search results according to the information it has on them. It also takes into account many other parameters including location, previous user requests, local laws, and more. Second, and this is the main criticism often heard about Google, the link indexing mechanism is not clear to users: why is a piece of content classified as highly relevant to a given query, when another appears well below the top twenty search results, which contain much more content directly applicable to that query?
Finally, the architecture of any search engine designed for Web2 – be it Google, Yandex, Bing, or Baidu – works with protocols like TCP / IP, DNS, URL, and HTTP / S, which means it uses of the addressed locations. or URL links. The user enters a query into the search bar, receives a list of hyperlinks to third party sites where the relevant content is located, and clicks on one of them. Then, the browser redirects them to a well-defined physical address of a server on the network, i.e. an IP address. What the hell is wrong with that? In fact, this approach creates a lot of problems. First, this type of schema can often make content inaccessible. For example, a hyperlink may be blocked by local authorities, not to protect the public from harmful or dangerous content, but for political reasons. Second, hyperlinks allow content to be falsified, that is, to replace it. Web content is currently extremely vulnerable, as it can change, disappear or be blocked at any time.
Web 3 represents a whole new stage of development in which the work with web content will be organized in a completely different way. The content is addressed by the hash of the content itself, which means that the content cannot be changed without changing its hash. With this approach, it is easier to find content in a P2P network without knowing its specific storage location i.e. the location of the server. Although it is not immediately obvious, it offers a huge advantage that will be extremely important in daily internet use: the ability to exchange permanent links that will not break over time. There are other advantages like copyright protection, for example, as it will no longer be possible to repost content a thousand times on different sites, as the sites themselves will no longer be needed as they are now. . The link to the original content will remain the same forever.
Why is a new search engine necessary for Web3?
Existing global search engines are centralized databases with limited access that everyone should trust. These search engines were developed primarily for client-server architectures of Web 2.
In content-oriented Web3, the search engine loses its unique power over search results: this power will be in the hands of the participants of the peer-to-peer network, who will themselves decide the ranking of the cyberlinks (the link between the content and not the link to the IP address or domain). This approach changes the rules of the game: there is no longer an arbitrary Google with its opaque link indexing algorithms, there is no longer a need for crawlers that collect information on possible content changes. on the sites there is no risk of being censored or becoming a victim of loss of privacy.
How does a web search engine 3 work?
Consider the architecture of a search engine designed for Web 3 using Cyber’s protocol as an example. Unlike other search engines, Cyber was designed to interact with the World Wide Web in a new way from the start..
A decentralized search engine differs from centralized search engines like Google because, with 3 web search engines, links to content are organized in a knowledge graph in which peers exchange information without being tied to centralized nodes. Users find the desired content through its hash, which is stored by another member of the network. Once the content is found and downloaded, the user becomes one of their distribution points. This pattern of operation resembles that of torrent networks, which provide reliable storage, resist censorship, and also help organize access to content in the absence of a good direct Internet connection.
To add content to the knowledge graph in Cyber protocol, it is necessary to perform a transaction with a cyberlink. This is similar to the payload field in an Ethereum transaction, except that the data is structured. The transaction is then validated via the Tendermint consensus, and the cyberlink is included in the knowledge graph. Every few blocks Cyber recalculates the ranking of all content in the knowledge graph based on a certain formula called cyberRank. Like PageRank, the new algorithm classifies content dynamically, but, at the same time, ensures that the knowledge graph is protected against spam, cyber attacks and selfish behavior of users through a cost-effective mechanism.
Cyber’s decentralized search engine users and validators form a supercomputer. Cyber’s ability to calculate ranks in the knowledge graph exceeds existing blockchain CPU computers by orders of magnitude, as its calculations are well parallelized and performed on a GPU. Therefore, any cyberlink is part of the knowledge graph almost instantly and is classified within a minute. Even paid advertising in adwords can’t deliver that speed, let alone the good old organic search engines, where indexing sometimes has to wait for months.
Ranking in a decentralized search engine for the Web 3
Cyber’s base is called Content Oracle. It is a dynamic, collaborative and distributed knowledge graph that is formed by the work of all participants in a decentralized network.
One of the key tasks that developers of a decentralized search engine face is designing the mechanisms that rank the links. In the case of a Web3 search engine, this is a cyberlink to relevant content. In Cyber protocol, this is implemented via tokenomics.
At the heart of tokenomics is the idea that users should be interested in the long-term success of Superintelligence. Therefore, in order to get tokens that will index the content V (volts) and rank it A (amps), it is necessary to get an H (hydrogen) token for a certain period of time. H, in turn, is produced by liquid staking of the mainnet token (BOOT for Bostrom and CYB for Cyber). Thus, Cyber users will be able to access the resources of the knowledge graph with a network token and receive similar staking income to Polkadot, Cosmos or Solana.
It’s true. The ranking of cyberlinks linked to an account depends on the number of tokens. But if tokens have such an impact on the search result, who will they belong to in the beginning? Seventy percent of Genesis tokens will be offered to users of Ethereum and its applications, as well as users of the Cosmos network. The airdrop will be done on the basis of an in-depth analysis of the activities in these networks. Thus, most of the stake will fall to users who have proven their ability to create value. Cyber believes this approach will lay the foundation for the semantic core of the Great Web, which will help civilization overcome the difficulties it has encountered.
What will an ordinary user see in a decentralized search engine?
Visually, the Cyber Protocol search results will differ little from the usual centralized search format. But there are several key advantages:
- Search results include the desired content, which can be read or viewed directly in the search results without going to another page.
- Buttons for interacting with apps on any blockchain and making payments to online stores can be integrated directly into search snippets.
How is the Cyber protocol tested?
Cyb.ai is an experimental prototype of a browser in a browser. With its help, you can search for content, surf content using a built-in ipfs node, index content, and most importantly, interact with decentralized applications. For the moment, Cyb is connected to a test network, but, after the launch of the Bostrom canary network On November 5, it will be possible to participate in the incredible Superintelligent Priming process with the help of Cyb.