Faroo - The Decentralized Search Engine With Uninfluenced Search Results!

The internet of today in general, is inclined towards favoring large, centralized service providers with globally famous brands as well as the more popular web addresses. Search engines such as Google etc; do the same as well! 

There is no doubt that Google dominates the world of internet search, and ordinary internet users like you and me, who aren’t large paying brands yet, pay the price for this dominance.

The Issssssues with Google

Google mines a ton of data, from off regular internet users! Google is able to attain a huge source of information about internet users from its search logs and from its advertising endeavors, which places cookies on your computers, to track the websites you visit. By means of these data, they are able to build a profile of internet users, founded on an indepth understanding of their personalities; which they eventually apply on sophisticated advertising techniques, which ofcourse has manipulative impacts as well.

How much good does this do an ordinary and now naked internet user?

One thing's for sure, Google may have an unhealthy lot of perhaps, private information, about you and power and monopoly over the internet, overall. Google can easily decide, which websites thrive or disappear into thin air, on the internet! It can decide what information it wants the world to see and what information it wants to hide, thus, influencing largely yet obliviously, the decision-making of regular internet users!

Some media/news websites have already accused Google of using this monopoly, in censoring important information as they decide it to be controversial reporting.

It is should be remembered that most of this data analysis is automated. CIA and other security agencies can decide to rely on Google as source of data analysis information to trace criminals, which can easily lead misguided criminal conviction.

For instance: who says academists researching on terrorism, can't become victims of harassment by security agencies, if the data analysis relied upon, are sourced out from cookies?

Remember centralization; yes, remember that all of this data is stored in central servers, making it susceptible to hackers, who can these steal data for further selfish gain.

Yes, google plays an amazing result in making life easy but just how much of our data should it have monopoly over?

Note that Google, though existing worldwide, has its base offshore, which can't be said to be bad in itself but tax-avoidance can easily come into the picture!

Google's algorithm for determining its search results is also responsible for a massive amount of link spamming, which deters anyone who runs a website, same as it disturbs regular users! 

A major chunk of Google algorithm for page ranking is based, on how many links are pointing to a website. As a result, spammers are constantly in a battle, to get to the lucrative top spots on google, by spamming their urls wherever possible. This something that Google, can only try to eliminate!

A Decentralized Solution

Faroo is a decentralized web search engine, that is said to offer full encryption to maintain privacy for its users.

image source/credit to: faroo.com

It's crawler and indexer are distributed. thus, making it strongly resistant to any form of censorship. All searches done using Faroo, are anonymous, and all data exchange is encrypted, giving it shield from the privacy issues that google poses!

To curb link spamming, instead of ranking web pages, according to how many links are linking back to them, webpages are ranked according to how much time Faroo users spend, on that particular page and how often they return to it.

Faroo's strong privacy protection is based on encryption and decentralization. If it's users, decide to download the crawling software, all data gathered is only used to build the distributed indexing of webpages. However, it is impossible for third party or companies, to gather this information or tally it to it's user.

Faroo is not yet perfect! It is still not integrated with blockchain technology, rather, it's being run as a private company. 

Integrating with a blockchain. would have helped Faroo to fund its development as well as provide rewards to people, who run the software on their computer, which will also increase the size of the index. 

Faroo should probably look into this and also eventually become an open source endeavor.

Trying Faroo, in my case, hasn't been a very bad experience. It does bring quality search top results and even for fairly obscure searches. To conclude on this, i had one simple test in mind, which you will see explained below!

My simple test with Faroo, that lead me to a measure of conclusion as regards it's ability to provide uninfluenced search results:

Long ago, when I was adopting my common username @surpassinggoogle, I used to play with the Google search engine manually. I didn't know any tech stuff but I wanted to have an insight into how its algorithms works, in terms of how it distributed information, thus, I would use the google search box as I played with different search terms. 
And yes, with one search phrase, it was evident that Google's way of determining relevant information is indeed influenced by superpowers of the world. 

For the search word, "face"; Google would always present 'Facebook' before your face, on the first page and first on the list of results! 

image source/credit to: google.com

In general, what does one who types the word "face" on google.com want to see?

What if I simply was looking for the 'definition of face' or 'types of faces'?

On the same first page, google search can also present you with facial products. This in turn, influences you, from you very search intention!

I ran similar test on Faroo, using the same search word 'face' and I loved its result. This told me alot!

image source/credit to: faroo.com
 

You can test it Faroo out directly on your browser Here! 

If you decide to download the crawler, to help make it more decentralized, plus produce better results, this is the download link: http://www.faroo.com/hp/p2p/download.html

Additional source/credit to:

http://cryptorials.io/faroo-the-decentralized-search-engine/