Nominations for New Media Awards 2006

Majestic-12: distributed search engine

Alex Chudnovsky

Hi, I was invited by Laura Petersen to submit this (self)nomination.
Our new media project called Majestic-12: Distributed Search Engine. It attempts to break effectively existing monopoly in world wide web search space by allowing ordinary people with idle computers and unlimited broadband connections to contribute to the search engine index. The area may sound boring, but ask yourself - can you live without using a search engine? I can't and so are many volunteers from all over the world who joined our collaborative project. Civic society is impossible without free access to uncensored information. Search engines are the gates to this information - you may not even know that some information was withheld from you because top 3 search engines are the entities that do not fundamentally depend upon people. In case of Majestic-12 its different since we completely depend on volunteers who run in background the software that crawls websites helping build what we hope to be the biggest index of the Web. In a very short time with less than 100 active participants we have crawled over 8 bln web pages and indexed over 1 bln - these numbers are expected to grow considerably this year (see our progress here:
http://www.majestic12.co.uk/forum/files/databasesize_161.jpg). While there is still a lot of work to be done in terms of improving relevance and speed of searches, we can already say that Majestic-12 (founded and based in the UK) is spearheading efforts to create a viable alternative controlled by the people to big 3 search engines. We strongly believe in democracy and hope that our project will contribute to civic society that actually made our project possible in the first place - had it not been for collective action around shared goal of building alternative World Wide Web search engine we would not have went as far as we did... and we not going to stop at these achievements, even though public recognition of our work will help greatly! Thank you. regards, Alex Some additional informatin about us can be found from these independent sources: 1) The Guardian: http://technology.guardian.co.uk/weekly/story/0,,1736761,00.html 2) bigmouthmedia: http://www.bigmouthmedia.com/live/articles/ how-much-do-you-trust-google-yahoo-and-msn-sear.asp/2883/ Alex Chudnovsky

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