# 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.

 

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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.

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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.

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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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