[jackrobison]

>Right, so nothing stops you from altering the search results at will, which is the most critical part of the system in my opinion.

You don't use the search server to perform resolution of claims, the search engine gives names that you then look up yourself. The resolve operations are provided by the SPV server, it cannot falsify results sent the the client as the client validates everything it gets (if the claim is winning this includes a proof that it is winning at the current block height). The server (like other SPV servers) could in some cases omit records/return false negatives, but it cannot alter them.

The SPV server is also open source and you can configure lbrynet to use whichever server you want, you don't need to use the default operated by us.