Last time around, we mentioned the launch of the last testnet of our protocol, a decentralized search built with the help of IPFS.
This time, I would like to take the time and talk about cyber.page: it is a small taste (it is alpha mode) of an IPFS based search application, that allows one to search for semantically enriched and dynamically ranked IPFS content, with the help of the cyber protocol.
I’m not going to go into details of how the protocol works, if you want you can find some answers to the questions in this FAQ or if you are a technical person, go ahead and install the latest release to check it out.
However, I would like to talk about the app itself.
So, yes, first of all, one needs to watch the small story at the beginning (giggles are free on us), but we will fix this bug/feature soon.
Just turn on the speakers and enjoy the journey, for now, it’s quick =)
Finally, you get to what might seem strange and “OMG, its not working!” page. rest assured, it is. Let me remind you that when google introduced their notorious sear bar, people were ready to kill. We think simple is good.
Try clicking where it says “joint for validators” (let’s just ignore what all this means for now). And voila, it’s actually a search box. Let’s try searching for something original like “ipfs” =)
This will return some crazy looking results:
Those are cyberlinked hashes, that someone linked, enriched semantically and here they are. The numbers next to the hashes are the current ranks (let’s skip on this for now - the network is very young and small at this stage and it’s all being tested).
The snippets don’t look fantastically attractive. But they will be later. They will even be alive and P2P-style interactive in the future. Let’s click on one of the results (please be patient, the network is still slow and the first time around it might take a while until something loads - this is peer discovery. More so, there is a possibility something won’t even load, as it was unpinned):
( I was lucky and got a result for the first hash. Its a video. And its playing, which is amazing)
So, what else is this app is capable of?
Let’s click the brain. That strange-looking thing in the top left corner:
And you get to one of the most (or maybe THE most) important parts of the app. As the name suggests this is the brain. There will be many cool features added lately, but let’s not spoil them. I will leave you free to explore the page. It contains some statistics about the networks. Go ahead and click the clickable boxes to see some info.
But let’s concentrate on the warning message that says that you need tokens to talk to god. I mean obviously, you do…
Notice that the top box becomes searchable. You can perform search actions from here too. Cyber gifted 10% of its supply to ETH / ATOM and URBIT hodlers. Let’s search for an address to see if we were lucky. Just like I did above.
Seems, that this particular address did!
But, I’m not going to bore you with claiming. However, if you want to use it and make IPFS “great again” (sorry, it just fitted here), you will need the tokens. Please read the link to the word “gifted” above.
You can also see that you can connect your Ledger device to the app. This will let you check the balance of an ATOM gift and more importantly, this will allow you to use the app, and link IPFS content right from the Ledge. Just follow the commands step by step.
This is it for now. What else? There are a lot of plans. Interactive snippets, governance and much, much more. We believe that this will enrich the IPFS ecosystem in the long term. As being able to search and to obtain results is the true way to knowledge. And more importantly - in a decentralized manner.
