US-based Vinod Sujan is developing a block chain-driven search engine Aarzoo that is set to launch early next year, holding out a promise to break Google’s monopoly over a wide swathe of the internet content universe.
Aarzoo will deliver search results that are “faithful to the query and completely unfazed and incorruptible by promoted or sponsored data,” Sujan told Moneycontrol.
“Unlike Google, we will not do paid Search Engine Results Pages (SERP) placement against brand awareness generation,” Sujan, founder and CEO of Aarzoo Search, said.
SERP are the pages that search engines display in response to a keyword query. While SERP lists out the search engine’s results of the keyword, the pages almost always contain advertisements.
“Unlike Google, we will not do paid SERP placement to generate online sales for clients. Unlike Google, we will not do paid SERP placement to generate leads. Unlike Google, we will not do paid SERP placement to drive traffic for client websites,” Sujan said.
Sujan said that technologically, Aarzoo Search, which was founded in October 2013, “is essentially scaling the peer-to-peer model, used by file-sharing applications, several levels up to an unprecedented, complex internet-wide level. The Stealth technology focuses on building a robust search infrastructure that would potentially make the internet faster, more efficient, and more capable of withstanding rapidly escalating levels of global user demand”.
A common criticism about block chain, however, is that the system suffers from structural problems. The size of individual block of transactions is fixed and the network enforces an average block generation rate of every ten minutes. This characteristic may hinder the creation of a credible Google competitor in the search engine space based on block chain.
“Correct. But that's the problem only with block chain based on the Bitcoin edifice - the so-called public block chains, where just about anyone can join,” Sujan said.
He, however, said that the block chain landscape has moved into more efficient systems. “Even Etherium based on the new proof-of-work protocol does 2000 transactions every 15 seconds. There's a platform called Bitshare that does a 10,000 transactions every 10 seconds. And we have platforms now being developed by credit card companies that are as fast as credit card companies want them to be,” Sujan said.
Aarzoo’s Search Engine Project (Stealth) draws upon `Pursuit Project’ first reported in an October 30, 2013 paper of the University of Cambridge.
According to the University of Cambridge, the project seeks to create “a revolutionary new architecture aims to make the internet more “social” by eliminating the need to connect to servers and enabling all content to be shared more efficiently”.
“The prototype, which has been developed as part of an EU-funded project called “Pursuit”, is being put forward as a proof-of concept model for overhauling the existing structure of the internet’s IP layer, through which isolated networks are connected, or “internetworked”, it said.
Sujan said that Aarzoo’s Stealth technology focuses on building a robust search infrastructure that would potentially make the internet faster, more efficient, and more capable of withstanding rapidly escalating levels of global user demand, he said.
The business model will be created around strong technological firewalls separating the search platform from the commercial modules that will manage subscriptions and advertising.
