> For the complete documentation index, see [llms.txt](https://timpi.gitbook.io/timpi-whitepaper/llms.txt). Markdown versions of documentation pages are available by appending `.md` to page URLs; this page is available as [Markdown](https://timpi.gitbook.io/timpi-whitepaper/technology/depin/guardian.md).
# Guardian
The internet contains approx. 1.8 billion websites, with around 250,000 new sites created every day. In order to create an index of the entire Internet. Timpi requires a vast amount of storage.
This is, besides the crawling challenge, also the reason why there are currently no real alternatives to Google or Bing (Bing powers Yahoo, DuckDuckGo does not have a search index of their own and use sources such as Google)as the initial investment in hardware (either bare metal or cloud) is too steep for anyone to justify.
That is why Timpi uses Guardians - distributed storage nodes - to solve this problem and distributes the data onto many nodes that are run by the community. Monitoring and coordination are the roles of the Overwatch. Maintaining a vast distributed network of Collectors and Guardians requires an entity that governs communications and transactions and establishes trusted relationships between all entities. Overwatch initially runs within the Core but will be moved into the community as a node in a later phase.
In this way, Timpi can ensure that the Guardian’s security is not compromised by running our software. All communications are secured via TLS1.3, and all information is completely anonymized. There is no direct connection to the Timpi website as our Information Broker is our middleware that isolates the Guardians from the frontend.
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