In a world of NSA scandals and cyber security threats, users are more concerned with their online privacy than ever before. The Blippex Chrome extension is a search engine “by the people, for the people.” It tracks how long people spend on a website and uses that data to build the search engine and rank the search results, and it recently added a built-in peer-to-peer network between browsers to anonymize the data sent to its servers. Basically, Blippex aims to rank pages by how long people spend on a website, and make it private.
Using the Blippex extension means that every URL you browse is sent to Blippex’s servers. The company continues to claim it doesn’t record a user’s IP-address, but some people question its motives in the future. In a blog post, the company explained it developed something that makes it technically impossible for it to say which IP address has seen that page it just indexed, and that is where this new peer-to-peer based anonymizing network steps in.
Blippex connects over WebRTC using PeerJS, which provides a complete, configurable and easy-to-use peer-to-peer connection API for WebRTC implementation. It depends on the WebRTC data channel and various other browser features to operate, which Blippex is using to "watch" on the client side and collect the information in a centralized spot.
“Right now this only works in the Chrome extension, Firefox is next, but the WebRTC technology is so new that we don’t even know yet if we have to build a separate network for Firefox or if the Firefox extension can communicate with the Chrome extension,” the company said in a blog post. “For now Opera and Safari don’t support WebRTC yet, but hopefully soon!”
Blippex founders Max Kossatz and Gerald Bäck say Blippex sees around 50,000 daily visits now, with probably 30-40 percent using Chrome, and half a million searches a day.
To learn more about the WebRTC data channel, a session with speakers from Temasys, Pub Nub and Amdocs/BlogGeek.me will cover how the data channel introduces more than just file sharing while in a video or audio conference – it has the potential to enable a multiplicity of new applications and services. Other related sessions include, “Using the Data Channel” with speakers from St. Edward’s University, Pub Nub and Peer5, and “WebRTC Impact on Your Network,” with speakers from HP and Amdocs/BlogGeek.me. The sessions will be held at the WebRTC Conference & Expo, happening Nov. 19 – 21 in Santa Clara, Calif.
Want to learn more about the latest in WebRTC? Be sure to attend WebRTC Conference & Expo, Nov. 19-21 in Santa Clara, Calif. Stay in touch with everything happening at WebRTC Conference & Expo. Follow us on Twitter.
Edited by
Stefania Viscusi
