Power to the People - an online movement against Search

Posted on 29th Nov 2011 by Scott Goodson in Blog

Watch out Google, Bing and Yahoo! There’s a new search engine in town. And it’s starting a movement all on its own, giving the power of search back to the people.

Called YaCy (pronounced “Ya See”), the new rival is backed by free software activists and will literally put search into the hands of web users by distributing the indexing engine around the Internet. As its strap line suggests, it’s ‘Web Search by the people, for the people’.

This basically means that anyone can download the YaCy software and help improve its offering by spreading the load of queries that people might search for online.

It’s a clever way of competing against the search engine giants by encouraging a powerful movement. Let’s face it; critical mass might be the only way that this particular David can beat Goliath.

What’s more, its creators not only hope that YaCy will be much harder to censor than existing search engines that filter searches through centralized servers, it also hopes to take away our current reliability on a small number of systems.

That’s to be expected because today, we seem to be moving away from this ‘centrally controlled’ approach. Thanks to technology and the Internet, we are increasingly becoming independent in all walks of life, moving away from our dependence on centralized things.

Today, people are coming together to create their own movements and in the process are making the world a better place. It's about 'decentralization' and freeing the world from limitations.

As project leader Michael Christen said in a recent press statement: “Most of what we do on the Internet involves search. It’s the vital link between us and the information we’re looking for. For such an essential function, we cannot rely on a few large companies, and compromise our privacy in the process.”

But will YaCy be a success? It will depend on how many people want to see an end to Google, Bing and Yahoo’s dominance of the web. Like with any movement, the power lies in the people. The people will decide.

One thing’s for sure; the monopolies of search could certainly be facing the beginning of the end.