Besides our enthusiastic kick-off, we slowly gain a more realistic but not pessimistic view on peer-to-peer web-indexing and searching: The upcoming year(s) will bring various PhD theses on that subject, addressing shortcomings of pioneer work, and providing a fundament for next-generation P2P applications.

open-search.net is aiming towards a tightrope walk between academic and real-world appliance. [NPO, open-source, free -> distinct from software-industry !] – For the time being, we feel that we can best provide valuable solutions for issues that are not addressed at University, while refraining from actual research on Peer-to-Peer and resort to existing P2P-implementations.

open-search.net will wrap one or more p2p lib/app and provide a open-source framework to aid development, prototyping, testing and distribution a p2p search-engine.

We split the project into 2 major task-forces:

• (A) API + back-end devel
• (B) Community + front-end

(A)

It is still one of our goals to povide the core in POSIX-C but it feels much more realistic to glue P2P libraries and search cores via local sockets and provide an API to bind crawlers, P2P-storage and data-processing to other programming languages.

(using java itself introduces latencies which are an order of magnitude larger that a local-socket API. Python, perl or haskell bindings might come in handy.)

The framework comprises a simple HTTP server, open-search configuration and session management, and API abstration to manage search-requests/results wrapped in a installable package.

The database to store the index, will evolve from static-file, via a dynamic query interface (forward queries to other search-engines) to a P2P example implementation (eg. using gnutella & existing torrents). well use the opensearch and other XML based import/export mechanisms.

p2p is not yet ready for a commercial grade search engine: thus flexibility and rapid prototyping are to be focused on!

(B)

different audiences:

• devels (core + framework)
• devels (serach + p2p)
• desigeners + front-end devels
• testers and users
• privacy – part of the open-search frameworks API.
• anonymity – separate layer (eg. TOR) – check p2p lib. support