Majestic-12 Distributed Search Engine (DSearch) is a working name for project that aims to build the biggest and the best WWW search engine using concepts of distributed computing. The project takes advantage of the power of multiple home and work computers around the world in a fashion similar to projects such as .

Anyone with a compatible computer and a broadband connection can join the project by downloading the freely available client software (see screenshot). Client software is currently available for Microsoft Windows and Linux. This client software, called MJ12node, runs in the background using very little CPU while crawling pages. Crawled data is sent back to the base server for indexing. It is expected that the client software will at some point include the ability to index data to help reduce CPU requirements at the central server.

As of September 2005 more than 20 million pages (URL) are being crawled every day with data sizes in excess of 450 GB per day. A total of 1.2 bln pages (15 Terabyte of data) had been crawled by project s participants. The current version of the search engine supports user-editable ranking formulae.

The current alpha version of the search engine index lists just over 44 million pages, and aims to make 1 billion of the already indexed pages searchable by the end of 2005.

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