A Survey on Content Retrieval on the Decentralised Web

The control, governance, and management of the web have become increasingly centralised, resulting in security, privacy, and censorship concerns. Decentralised initiatives have emerged to address these issues, beginning with decentralised file systems. These systems have gained popularity, with major platforms serving millions of content requests daily. Complementing the file systems are decentralised search engines and name registry infrastructures, together forming the basis of a decentralised web . This survey paper analyses research trends and emerging technologies for content retrieval on the decentralised web, encompassing both academic literature and industrial projects. Several challenges hinder the realisation of a fully decentralised web. Achieving comparable performance to centralised systems without compromising decentralisation is a key challenge. Hybrid infrastructures, blending centralised components with verifiability mechanisms, show promise to improve decentralised initiatives. While decentralised file systems have seen more mature deployments, they still face challenges such as usability, performance, privacy, and content moderation. Integrating these systems with decentralised name-registries offers a potential for improved usability with human-readable and persistent names for content. Further research is needed to address security concerns in decentralised name-registries and enhance governance and crypto-economic incentive mechanisms

A Survey on Content Retrieval on the Decentralised Web

The control, governance, and management of the web have become increasingly centralised, resulting in security, privacy, and censorship concerns. Decentralised initiatives have emerged to address these issues, beginning with decentralised file systems. These systems have gained popularity, with major platforms serving millions of content requests daily. Complementing the file systems are decentralised search engines and name registry infrastructures, together forming the basis of a decentralised web. This survey paper analyses research trends and emerging technologies for content retrieval on the decentralised web, encompassing both academic literature and industrial projects. Several challenges hinder the realisation of a fully decentralised web. Achieving comparable performance to centralised systems without compromising decentralisation is a key challenge. Hybrid infrastructures, blending centralised components with verifiability mechanisms, show promise to improve decentralised initiatives. While decentralised file systems have seen more mature deployments, they still face challenges such as usability, performance, privacy, and content moderation. Integrating these systems with decentralised name-registries offers a potential for improved usability with human-readable and persistent names for content. Further research is needed to address security concerns in decentralised name-registries and enhance governance and crypto-economic incentive mechanisms

Towards a Decentralized Search Engine for P2P-Network Communities

The paper considers the data search problem in distributed P2P networks. Since no central search engines are available, other effective methods must be developed to avoid a complete search of all nodes each time. We investigate mechanisms and introduce the main structure and functionality of such a decentralized cooperative search engine. It is working on the basis of so called ants. This search engine reduces the search time for information, which are needed by more than one node in a peer-to-peer network community. Therefore, the ants are able to switch in a special manner between different behavior strategies to search, concentrate and return the respective information. The various strategies are derived from ant colonies and were simulated in a small world community environment