[HN Gopher] AnyBT: A BitTorrent Search Engine Works on ENS and IPFS
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       AnyBT: A BitTorrent Search Engine Works on ENS and IPFS
        
       Author : jerry374
       Score  : 49 points
       Date   : 2023-09-22 12:22 UTC (10 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (anybt.eth.link)
 (TXT) w3m dump (anybt.eth.link)
        
       | sampa wrote:
       | no files inside listed unlike btdig
        
       | devdao wrote:
       | Where's the code?
        
       | promiseofbeans wrote:
       | Adding a tracking parameter to the link is very uncool
        
         | nsonha wrote:
         | uncool would be blindly objecting something without even
         | understanding why you do it.
        
         | Double_a_92 wrote:
         | What's uncool about the creator knowing which social media
         | outlet worked the best for their "advertising"? It doesn't hurt
         | you.
        
         | jerry374 wrote:
         | Sorry for that, first time ever post on Hacker News. Didn't
         | know this, and I can't edit the link after I posted.
        
           | promiseofbeans wrote:
           | No worries. Cool project by the way!
        
         | ipaddr wrote:
         | Tracking saying this came from hn is not uncool it's slightly
         | cool. It's a way to say all of these people are from that cool
         | site hackernews. Uncool is browser fingerprinting, tracking
         | mouse movements and forcing signups through gmail. uncool.
        
       | dumbfounder wrote:
       | Is this meant to be decentralized to avoid shutdown? Where is the
       | engine itself hosted? Ens is just a naming system and ipfs is
       | just a file address system right? So the engine itself still
       | needs to be hosted somewhere? Would like to hear more about it,
       | but no info available on the site.
        
         | jerry374 wrote:
         | Actually the engine itself is also decentralized, there are
         | multiple nodes running the search index over the network. There
         | will be more docs coming out.
        
           | dumbfounder wrote:
           | How is it decentralized? Are you using Filecoin VM? Doing
           | your own thing?
        
             | jerry374 wrote:
             | The index files are stored on Filecoin, and there are
             | multiple nodes loading those index files and serving
             | queries.
        
               | dumbfounder wrote:
               | Multiple nodes that you run? What's the incentive for
               | others to run them?
        
               | [deleted]
        
         | ploum wrote:
         | That's the very goal of IPFS: hosting is distributed. Every
         | node taking part in the IPFS network may or may not have pieces
         | of this particular website.
         | 
         | Eth.link seems to be a centralized proxy enabling you to access
         | that without an IPFS/EthDNS browser.
         | 
         | It should also be noted that what is hosted is a simple list of
         | hashes with a name (and a size). The search engine is trivially
         | looking through the name and displaying matching hashes.
         | 
         | Then, your bittorrent client try to find any torrent matching
         | the hash (this is the magnet protocol).
         | 
         | So, yeah, you download something from nowhere. This is the real
         | "cloud" we have been expecting for the last 20 years ;-)
        
           | dumbfounder wrote:
           | IPFS only serves files, there is no server side compute. You
           | can't just scan ipfs like a database so there needs to be
           | some other tech used for the engine itself, as OP indicates.
        
             | ploum wrote:
             | yeah, indeed, my bad.
        
       | ramon156 wrote:
       | Qbit search works fine, why would I choose a rewrite?
        
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       (page generated 2023-09-22 23:02 UTC)