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Revolutionizing Decentralized Apps with D-Search: A Decentralized Search Engine

Introduction
Problem Statement
Current State of Decentralized Apps and Services
The Importance of Search in Decentralized Apps
The Drawbacks of Centralized Search in Decentralized Apps
Introducing D-Search: A Decentralized Search Engine
The Search Pipeline and its Key Components
Challenges in Building a Decentralized Search Engine
The Solution: Decoupling State from Computation
Ensuring Verifiability in D-Search
Addressing Privacy Concerns in D-Search
Performance Evaluation of D-Search
Conclusion

Introduction

Decentralization has become a major focus in recent years, with the rise of decentralized applications (d-apps) providing alternatives to popular centralized services. However, one key aspect that has been missing in the decentralized ecosystem is a reliable and private search engine. Current d-apps rely on centralized search engines, which can lead to issues such as censorship and bias. To address these challenges, we propose D-Search, a decentralized, verifiable, and private search engine system that aims to enhance the user experience and promote the principles of decentralization.

Problem Statement

The current ecosystem of decentralized services and Blockchain apps lacks a robust search engine system. While decentralized applications have gained popularity as alternatives to centralized services, their reliance on centralized search engines poses significant threats to user interests and violates the principles of transparency and fairness. Two major issues with centralized search in d-apps are opaque censorship and search bias. Developers can censor certain blocks or promote certain listings for financial gain, undermining the concept of decentralization. Therefore, there is a need for a decentralized search engine that can address these challenges.

Current State of Decentralized Apps and Services

The burst of the internet has led to a rapid increase in the popularity of decentralized applications and services. These d-apps provide alternatives to popular centralized services, including e-commerce, social media, and video sharing platforms. For example, Open Bazaar is a decentralized e-commerce marketplace that allows third-party search engines to crawl and index shopping items. Steemit, on the other HAND, is a decentralized social media platform where users often search for blocks of their interest. Search plays a crucial role in enhancing the user experience of these d-apps.

The Importance of Search in Decentralized Apps

Search functionality is essential in decentralized applications due to the decentralized nature of the data. Users rely on search engines to discover and navigate through the vast amount of data available in d-apps. Whether it's finding the ideal shopping item on a decentralized marketplace or searching for Relevant content on a decentralized social media platform, a robust search engine is crucial for users to make the most of these d-apps. However, the current reliance on centralized search engines in d-apps poses serious threats to user interests.

The Drawbacks of Centralized Search in Decentralized Apps

Centralized search engines in decentralized apps Present several drawbacks that hinder the principles of decentralization. The first and most critical issue is opaque censorship, where developers can prevent certain blocks or content from appearing on the front-end. This censorship undermines the transparency and openness that decentralization aims to provide. Additionally, search engines can be influenced by paid listings and search bias, where search engine owners promote certain listings for financial gain. These issues compromise the fairness and integrity of the search results, violating the principles of decentralization.

Introducing D-Search: A Decentralized Search Engine

To overcome the challenges posed by centralized search engines in d-apps, we propose D-Search, a decentralized search engine system. D-Search aims to provide a decentralized, verifiable, and private search experience for users of decentralized applications. By decoupling state from computation and incorporating verifiability and privacy features, D-Search ensures a transparent and fair search process in the decentralized ecosystem.

The Search Pipeline and its Key Components

The search pipeline in D-Search consists of several key components that work together to provide efficient and accurate search results. First, the data is stored on a public blockchain or IPFS (InterPlanetary File System), which allows users to authenticate the data source. The crawler then translates the data items into an easy-to-parse data structure. The indexer uses these items to generate an inverted index, and finally, the query utilizes the index to serve search results based on user keywords.

Challenges in Building a Decentralized Search Engine

Building a decentralized search engine poses several challenges that need to be addressed. One challenge is ensuring state availability in a decentralized environment, considering that search workers can leave unexpectedly. Another challenge is detecting dishonest behaviors such as censorship or bias in a trusted environment. Additionally, in an untrusted environment, search workers can track user search keywords and results, compromising user privacy. Overcoming these challenges requires innovative solutions that prioritize transparency, fairness, and efficiency.

The Solution: Decoupling State from Computation

To address the challenges of state availability and transparency, D-Search decouples state from computation. It introduces a global append-only storage called Kanban, built on top of a public cloud infrastructure. Kanban provides high availability storage with data integrity. Additionally, D-Search utilizes decentralized lambdas, stateless workers that constantly commit their state to Kanban. This architectural design ensures scalability and fault tolerance in the search process.

Ensuring Verifiability in D-Search

Verifiability is crucial in a decentralized search engine to ensure transparency and trust. D-Search achieves verifiability in two aspects: verifiable Kanban and verifiable lambdas. Kanban content is divided into epochs, with each epoch having a root hash calculated and committed to the blockchain. Users can verify the contents of a particular epoch using on-chain hashes. For verifiable lambdas, witnesses are generated to Record the causality between input and output in the search pipeline. These witnesses form a verification plane, enabling offline verification of search results.

Addressing Privacy Concerns in D-Search

D-Search takes privacy concerns seriously and incorporates measures to protect user queries. While SGX (Software Guard Extensions) can provide isolated execution for the search function, there are still privacy threats from network adversaries and malicious apps. D-Search mitigates these threats by equalizing message plans to prevent keyword inference and using existing ORAM (Oblivious RAM) schemes to ensure every search triggers a different memory address path. These measures enhance user privacy and protect them from both network and execution adversaries.

Performance Evaluation of D-Search

To evaluate the performance of D-Search, we built a research prototype and tested it on two existing systems, Steemit and Open Bazaar. The prototype was deployed on a combination of local SGX machines and AWS. The end-to-end latency of D-Search for a single keyword search was found to be within 50 milliseconds, comparable to today's search engines. The throughput of D-Search scaled horizontally in a native verification setting, with dedicated verification significantly accelerating the verification process.

Conclusion

In conclusion, D-Search is a decentralized search engine system designed specifically for decentralized applications and services. It addresses the challenges posed by centralized search engines in the decentralized ecosystem, ensuring transparency, fairness, and privacy for users. By decoupling state from computation and incorporating verifiability and privacy features, D-Search offers a reliable and efficient search experience. With its potential to revolutionize the decentralized ecosystem, D-Search opens up new possibilities for the future of decentralized applications.

Highlights

D-Search is a decentralized search engine system designed for decentralized applications.
It addresses the challenges of centralized search engines in the decentralized ecosystem.
D-Search ensures transparency, fairness, and privacy for users.
It decouples state from computation to enhance scalability and fault tolerance.
Verifiability features in D-Search enable transparent and trustworthy search results.
Privacy concerns are addressed through measures like equalizing message plans and ORAM.
Performance evaluation shows promising results in terms of latency and scalability.

FAQ

Q: Can D-Search be used with any decentralized application? A: Yes, D-Search is designed to be compatible with any decentralized application that requires search functionality. Its decentralized nature and verifiability features make it suitable for a wide range of d-apps.

Q: How does D-Search ensure fairness in search results? A: D-Search tackles the issue of search bias through its decentralized and verifiable architecture. By decoupling state from computation and incorporating witnesses, it ensures that search results are not influenced by paid listings or biased preferences.

Q: Will D-Search compromise user privacy? A: No, D-Search prioritizes user privacy and incorporates measures to protect user queries from network adversaries and malicious apps. By equalizing message plans and utilizing ORAM schemes, D-Search enhances user privacy in the search process.

Q: Does D-Search have any limitations in terms of scalability? A: D-Search is designed to scale horizontally, ensuring scalability in the search process. However, the use of SGX machines and the overhead of verifiability measures may impose some limitations on the system's scalability in larger deployments.

Q: Can D-Search be integrated with existing centralized search engines? A: While D-Search is primarily designed for decentralized applications, it can potentially be integrated with existing centralized search engines to enhance their transparency and verifiability. This integration would require careful consideration of the specific use case and technical requirements.

Q: Are there any performance trade-offs in using D-Search compared to centralized search engines? A: D-Search aims to provide a comparable user experience to centralized search engines in terms of latency and throughput. However, the incorporation of verifiability measures and privacy protections may introduce some overhead, which needs to be balanced with the desired level of decentralization and user trust.