Roadmap
From Seeks
There are four main envisioned milestones for Seeks:
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Codename SOLO
Seeks provides a websearch proxy and a local metasearch engine. The meta engine aggregates websearch results from several mainstream search engines. The aggregation is based on consensus among the search engines. At this point Seeks provides a plugin system that allows to easily build sets of URL interceptors and webpage modifiers. Applications rank from ad-blocking to dynamic webpage enhancements or aggregation. The metasearch engine comes in the form of such a plugin.
Codename HIPPY
Seeks provides the basic collaborative functionality on top of existing search engines by connecting people that search the web with similar queries. The similarity-based pattern-matching technique used is known as locality sensitive hashing (LSH) and we distribute it among the peers. Existing search engines results are re-sorted and enhanced with the information fetched from the peer-to-peer network, such as ratings, other relevant results, related queries of interest, and direct chat opportunity is provided to users performing the same, or approached queries. Enhanced with a clean and modern interface within the browser, we believe these core capabilities should be of interest to number of people, and we wish they draw in users, testers and developers in sufficient numbers.
Codename DANDELION
The next step is key to the Seeks project, and introduces what we believe is one of its most beneficial features. Seeks will propose a self-publishing mechanism accessible to anybody with a browser and an Internet connection. Instead of relying on a search engine for linking keywords to web contents, Seeks will let users register any URL of their choice using their own set of keywords. Users querying the peer-to-peer network (DHT) will thus be recommended web content without using any existing search engine. This operation would be the combination of a DHT lookup plus a push on the peers of interest. The operation should not cost more than a file lookup on your favorite peer-to-peer application, (i.e. ok-fast). Users that would register their personal web content or that of others under unsatisfactory keywords or queries would see their keyword associations naturally rated down by other users, in a move that we believe should lead to a better match of keywords and queries to the true content of a web page.
Codename PLUM
The final step proposes a decentralized web information index to gradually re-capture public information currently stored in private corporate facilities. We propose to implement small software extensions to common Web servers, such as Apache. These extensions would allow web servers to locally index their webpages and share the indexes with other web servers and users, in a decentralized manner, on the Seeks network. The consequence is that over time, Seeks would evolve a parallel search engine, processing queries against a decentralized database of information rated by the community for the community.
