PeARS recipient
Mozilla MOSS Award

PeARS team is very excited to have been chosen as one of eight recipients of a MOSS "mission partners" award. We congratulate the other grantees who all have exciting projects, from anonymity preservation to game engines and screen readers for the visually impaired!

What does the award mean for PeARS? We received a generous award of $15,500, which will allow us to do the following:

• Rent some Virtual Private Servers (VPS) for development and testing.
• Provide financial support for one team member working full-time on our Distributed Hash Table for 3 months.
• Organise a one-week team meeting/public workshop in India in 2017.
• Contract a professional graphics designer to work on the project's user interface and online material.

We invite everybody to check out the Mozilla manifesto. PeARS wholeheartedly supports the initiative and hope to contribute to the MOSS community in several ways:

• We want to give a proof-of-concept that Internet search can be a free and open technology, ensuring that each individual can shape it according to their needs, without meddling from business and political interests. Web search is often regarded as a complex and expensive 'big data' application, the design and running of which we must leave to large corporations. PeARS aims at breaking down this myth by building a distributed search application that can run on a home laptop, and will be configurable by users.
• We want to concretely demonstrate that decentralisation can replace big data applications currently running on huge server farms, thus encouraging public participation in re-shaping Internet search.
• We want to make individuals aware of their privacy choices on the Internet by giving them a tool to privately process their browsing history and consciously decide what to share of their personal information.

Like our goals? Then come and chat to us. You can contribute too!