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Helios designed · not yet built

A search engine for the decentralized web — no central crawler to trust, no authority to rank, no advertiser to serve. Named for the sun, which sees everything and takes no side. Reads what the chain says exists and lets you find it by name, by tag, by content, by who you trust.

The problem

Every search engine that matters today is one company deciding what the web looks like. It crawls what it wants, indexes what it chooses, ranks by what pays it, and drops what its lawyers dislike. On the ordinary web that is livable — most sites are on cooperating hosts and there is a shared understanding of what "the open web" means. On a network where nobody hosts anything centrally and nobody approves what gets published, a company-run search would recreate exactly the gatekeeper the network was built to escape.

A search engine for the decentralized web has to be built with the same rules as the network it searches: no crawler that any single party runs, no ranking any single party decides, and no listing any single party can remove. That is Helios.

How Helios will work

  1. The chain is the truth about what exists. Every BNS name registered on Bitcoin Cash is a piece of a public index — no crawler needed to find them. Helios reads the same records every resolver reads, plus the on-chain APS1 app listings from Prometheus, plus any signed metadata records (title, description, tags) that publishers attach to their names.
  2. Content indexing is opt-in. For the bytes behind a name (an HTML page, a document), Helios only indexes what the publisher marks as indexable — a signed idx record with a category and tag list. Nobody crawls anyone. If a site does not want to be searchable, it isn't.
  3. Ranking is by signed endorsement, not by an algorithm nobody understands. Names on your trust list carry weight for you. Names on nobody's trust list appear at the bottom. Nothing paid ever floats. Change trust lists, change results — the ranking is transparent because it is yours.
  4. The frontend can run anywhere. Helios's index is data on chain plus data on Sia — a spec, not a service. The reference frontend runs at helios.silentmode.bch, but any client can build its own index and its own UI from the same public substrate. If Silent Mode's Helios goes down, another Helios exists tomorrow.

What it will NOT do

Track you

No accounts, no cookies, no per-user history. Every search is the same request shape; the server has nothing to profile.

Rank by payment

There is no sponsored-result slot, no bidding, no advertising surface at all. Storage costs money; searches don't.

Moderate content

Helios shows you what your trust list vouches for. Filtering out categories or publishers is your subscription choice, not the engine's policy.

Depend on one operator

The index is public. If Silent Mode stops hosting Helios tomorrow, the data and the spec are still there — anyone can run their own.

Status: designed, not built. This page is a placeholder for the intent. The record types (idx, tag) need to be specified in the BNS protocol addendum, the reference frontend needs to be built, and a trust-list subscription format needs to be settled with Hermes so both use the same shape. Watch this page.