Unlike traditional centralized search engines, work such as crawling, data mining, indexing, and query processing is distributed among several peers in a decentralized manner where there is no single point of control.
[3] On December 15, 2003, Michael Christen announced development of a P2P-based search engine, eventually named YaCy, on the heise online forums.
In April 2000 several programmers (including Gene Kan, Steve Waterhouse) built a prototype P2P web search engine based on Gnutella called InfraSearch.
[11] In February 2001 Wolf Garbe published an idea of a peer-to-peer search engine,[12] started the Faroo prototype in 2004,[13] and released it in 2005.
[14][15] The goals of building a distributed search engine include: 1. to create an independent search engine powered by the community; 2. to make the search operation open and transparent by relying on open-source software; 3. to distribute the advertising revenue to node maintainers, which may help create more robust web infrastructure; 4. to allow researchers to contribute to the development of open-source and publicly-maintainable ranking algorithms and to oversee the training of the algorithm parameters.