While I assume one could, I'm not sure it would be easy to implement web search in Ethereum?
First of all, you would need a way for a contract to be able to access webpages to get information about links. I the contract could pay people to give it the content of a webpage? I'm not sure how it would verify it for non https websites, without getting copies from multiple users, which would cause problems if the webpage was not static.
Second of all, the memory to store what pages link to what pages would, I think, be expensive for contract storage. Maybe if it used swarm?
I guess it would use swarm.
Still, the contract would have to have a short running time (in order to be relatively inexpensive). Maybe if instead of the contract producing the results, it would have others create the results, and then verify them in some way, and reward those that created the results?
I don't know.
I don't really know my stuff, but it seems to me that implementing a decentralized search engine with Ethereum would be fairly difficult.
First of all, you would need a way for a contract to be able to access webpages to get information about links. I the contract could pay people to give it the content of a webpage? I'm not sure how it would verify it for non https websites, without getting copies from multiple users, which would cause problems if the webpage was not static.
Second of all, the memory to store what pages link to what pages would, I think, be expensive for contract storage. Maybe if it used swarm?
I guess it would use swarm.
Still, the contract would have to have a short running time (in order to be relatively inexpensive). Maybe if instead of the contract producing the results, it would have others create the results, and then verify them in some way, and reward those that created the results?
I don't know.
I don't really know my stuff, but it seems to me that implementing a decentralized search engine with Ethereum would be fairly difficult.