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A Survey on Content Retrieval on the Decentralised Web

Research output: Contribution to Journal/MagazineJournal articlepeer-review

E-pub ahead of print
  • Navin Keizer
  • Onur Ascigil
  • Michał Król
  • Dirk Kutscher
  • George Pavlou
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<mark>Journal publication date</mark>4/03/2024
<mark>Journal</mark>ACM Computing Surveys
Publication StatusE-pub ahead of print
Early online date4/03/24
<mark>Original language</mark>English

Abstract

The control, governance, and management of the web have become increasingly centralised, resulting in security, privacy, and censorship concerns. Decentralised initiatives have emerged to address these issues, beginning with decentralised file systems. These systems have gained popularity, with major platforms serving millions of content requests daily. Complementing the file systems are decentralised search engines and name registry infrastructures, together forming the basis of a decentralised web . This survey paper analyses research trends and emerging technologies for content retrieval on the decentralised web, encompassing both academic literature and industrial projects. Several challenges hinder the realisation of a fully decentralised web. Achieving comparable performance to centralised systems without compromising decentralisation is a key challenge. Hybrid infrastructures, blending centralised components with verifiability mechanisms, show promise to improve decentralised initiatives. While decentralised file systems have seen more mature deployments, they still face challenges such as usability, performance, privacy, and content moderation. Integrating these systems with decentralised name-registries offers a potential for improved usability with human-readable and persistent names for content. Further research is needed to address security concerns in decentralised name-registries and enhance governance and crypto-economic incentive mechanisms.