Re: Idea for a new coin, seeing if it might be feasible. P2P Search engine?
The first thing that comes to mind is how rankings would be determined. It sounds like all miners would have to agree that a given rank is valid. If there was a deterministic ranking method, a sort of DoS attack could be possible whereby one creates pages that satisfy the ranking criteria fully but have no usable content.
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If you'd like to see some empirical evidence of this attack, look up search engine optimization.
It turns out the economically rational action is to game the ranking algorithm.
edit:
If you'd like to see some empirical evidence of this attack, look up search engine optimization.
It turns out the economically rational action is to game the ranking algorithm.What do you mean by "to game the ranking algorithm"?
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I mean that web pages benefit from being perceived as relevant to a search query, even if they're not. If the methods for determining a web page's relevance are completely open source, it follows that a particularly dedicated entity could possibly create numerous web pages that are designed solely to be ranked as relevant, while having little actual content other than advertisements.