Worldwide Distributed Wisdom
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Modern search engines organize knowledge by popularity, not by depth. What goes viral becomes visible. What remains quiet disappears. This structure systematically deforms our ability for judgment, deliberation, and democratic thinking. Worldwide Distributed Wisdom (WDW) is a decentralized metasearch engine that stands in the tradition of German non-profit search projects (Metager, University of Hannover, since 1996) — extended through three innovations: 1. Decentralized P2P architecture – no central servers, every user becomes part of the infrastructure 2. Ranking-free display – all results are equal (alphabetical, not popularity-based) 3. Permanent archiving – what disappears from commercial search engines is automatically preserved WDW aggregates results from Google, Bing, Brave, DuckDuckGo, Metager, and others — plus community-generated content in a Holochain DHT. The result: a more complete coverage of digital knowledge than any individual search engine, without central control, without popularity filters, permanently accessible. Keywords: Metasearch engine, democracy, P2P, Holochain, decentralization, commons, knowledge infrastructure
Author: Eweleit, Sven
Language: English
Subfield: Information Systems
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7105823138
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