Google is the entry point for billions to the web. The search engine titan is the world’s preeminent data indexer, allowing web users to find answers in a sea of chaos. It’s not the first search engine and is by no means the best at everything it does but it’s the most accessible.
Google controls more than 90% of the global search engine market, with competitors like Bing and Yahoo struggling to capture significant market share. Google’s dominance is even more pronounced in mobile search, where it’s the default search engine for Android devices and the preferred choice of billions of smartphone users.
But while Google is adept at returning websites, social results, images, video, and answering common questions, some domains lie beyond its scope. One of these is web3, where instead of being routed over the clearnet, data is transmitted across blockchain networks. Querying this data calls for a different kind of search engine, one that can make it easily accessible to developers as opposed to consumers. Which poses the question: what’s the closest thing web3 has to Google?
Making Sense of Web3 Data
Web3 is many things in many places simultaneously. It includes public and private blockchains, protocols, dapps, and wallets. It resides on thousands of blockchains and incorporates hundreds of thousands of assets whose prices are constantly shifting in real-time. Making sense of all this data is a complex process that demands specialist infrastructure that can support multi-chain queries with low latency and maximum availability.
Unlike web2, where data is stored in centralized databases and accessed through API calls to specific servers, web3 data is stored across multiple nodes on decentralized networks. This can make data retrieval slower and more complex. Aggregating and querying data from multiple sources without a central point of access places an additional burden on infrastructure providers.
Today, a host of web3 infra services compete to provide web3 data to centralized and decentralized platforms. Through APIs and dedicated data layers, they route information throughout the cryptosphere, supplying asset prices, trading data, smart contract logic, and feeds from oracles, bridges, and other onchain sources.
These data providers can be thought of as operating a web3 search engine that provides dapps with the answers they’re seeking: “What’s the latest price of ETH?” “How much is TSL stock?” “What’s the open interest on Bitget?” The results may be returned as numerical data rather than human readable outputs, but the process is the same. This is search on an industrial scale.
To build upon this concept, if there is one data service that can lay claim to being the Google of web3, it’s SQD. Its architecture and sheer scope of data points make SQD the closest thing web3 has to a universal search. Here’s how it works.
Plunging Into SQD’s Data Lake
SQD is a decentralized query engine and a horizontally-scalable data lake for batch queries. Its modular design is complemented by a rapidly growing array of popular tools that can be used to access queries retrieved from SQD’s decentralized data lake. Developers can access SQD using their preferred programming language and frameworks, retrieve data from virtually any source and route it to custom targets.
SQD’s ambitious goal of structuring and preparing all data from all chains is the reason why it warrants being described as the Google of web3. It supports data-heavy chains such as Solana as well as expansive ecosystems such as ETH and its L2s. But Google would not be the giant it is had it not found product market fit and become the go-to solution for enterprises and consumers alike. In this respect, SQD also passes scrutiny.
T-Mobile Deutsche Telekom MMS is one of several significant enterprises to have partnered with SQD, having agreed to provide dedicated worker nodes that help decentralize its data network. It’s among many independent node operators to have supported SQD, having bought into its vision of aggregating all web3 data into a single portal. Ultimately, though, it’s the businesses using the service as data consumers that will fully validate SQD’s concept of a universal web3 data lake.
The Quest to Index Everything
Despite the progress that web3 infra providers have made in aggregating web3 data, it remains a complex technical environment that’s fraught with challenges. For example, blockchain architecture, which is reliant on consensus mechanisms, can incur delays in data availability and there can also be consistency issues due to forks or orphaned blocks. Maintaining real-time data access can be tricky, especially during network congestion or forks.
In the past, all of these challenges were faced head-on by dapp developers, who had to run and maintain a node for every chain they wished to query. Web3 data streaming services eliminate this requirement, freeing builders to build in the knowledge that they can query any chain or token instantly. As blockchains grow in size, and the number of chains proliferates, data indexing services are now the default gateway for querying web3.
