Mining the web with webcoin

Uri Klarman, Marcel Flores, Aleksandar Kuzmanovic

Abstract: Four major search engines, Google in particular, hold a unique position in enabling the use of the Internet, as they alone direct over 98% of Internet users to the content they seek, using proprietary indices. While the contribution of these companies is undeniable, their design is necessarily affected by their economic interests, which may or may not align with those of the users, raising concerns regarding their effect on the availability of information around the globe. While multiple academic and commercial projects aimed to distribute and democratize the Web search, they failed to gain much traction, mostly due to inferior results and lack of incentives for participation. In this paper, we show how complex networking-intensive tasks can be crowdsourced using Bitcoin's incentive model. We present Webcoin, a novel distributed digital-currency which utilizes networking resources rather then computational, and can only be mined through Web indexing. Webcoin provides both the incentives and the means to create Google-scale indices, freely available to competing services and the public. Webcoin's design overcomes numerous unique challenges, such as index verification, scalability, and nodes' ability to actively manipulate webpages. We deploy 200 fully-functioning Webcoin nodes and demonstrate their low bandwidth requirements.