Google dominates the search market. Bing has made an impression and Yahoo still has a loyal following, but Google is king, especially in the West. However, a new search engine has just been launched, and it does things differently.

The new search engine is called YaCy (pronounced “Ya See”). Heavily backed by the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE), an organisation that advocates digital rights and online freedom, YaCy aims to de-centralise search by using a ‘peer to peer’ approach.

The fallout over the publication of diplomatic information on Wikileaks illustrates how digital activism has come of age. As the US government put pressure on companies to sever ties with the international leaks website, groups fought back with a co-ordinated campaign. One group, calling itself ‘Anonymous’, proved particularly well organised.

The credit card company VISA was one of those who suspended services in the aftermath, allegedly under political duress. Soon after, the VISA website was overwhelmed by a “distributed denial of service attack’’ (DDoS) by the group called ‘Anonymous’, forcing it to go offline. The credit card company can process 10,000 transactions per second, but amazingly, their website was toppled by just 2,000 people running a simple piece of software on their machines. In reality the exercise was for propaganda purposes – Visa use a different server for their critical payments processing service – but nonetheless it demonstrated the increasing power of online activists.