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Faroo, a German based startup, has launched a P2P search engine that lets users search and browse the web via P2P technology.
Faroo’s search engine uses a distributed crawling, indexing and ranking to provide relevant search terms. Whenever a user opens a web page in a browser, the page automatically gets inserted into the distributed index of the P2P network. If the technology gets traction this will enable an almost complete index that will be updated in real time.
Faroo does not store the search index on a central server but rather uses distributed indexing. Faroo makes every P2P users a part of its index and assigns certain keywords to him, if another users visits the pages associated with these keywords he also gets assigned to the index of these keywords. The index is replicated across multiple nodes in order to create redundancy and prevent information loss.
Faroo has developed a new ranking technology called PeerRank, which takes users behavior into account while determining the ranking of the page. So for example if a user is a technology freak and visits a certain website quiet frequently the website will be assigned a higher ranking. Just like the distributed index, the distributed ranking will become more representative with widespread usage and is immune to hazards like link buying and other forbidden SEO techniques to pump up search ranks.
Faroo has also built personalization into the system and creates a personalized rank, which determines which pages would be more relevant to the user. The personalized ranking is gleaned from users browsing habits.
Faroo is also immune to scaling issues and does not require huge data centers to function. Since it uses P2P technology, performance and load grows with the number of users and could scale to an unlimited number of users, documents, keywords and queries.
The technology is a result of 5 years of research and development and is a result of taking the best of bread technological breakthroughs from 1500+ academic research papers. In my testing I didn’t find the results to be as relevant as Google, but that could change with widespread usage.
The biggest problem I see in this idea is that the user is sharing private data (+ his processor cycles and network bandwidth) and doesn’t get anything in return…
They can leverage the peer network to solve many scaling problems, but google has already solved them well enough by spending lots of money (which they have and keep raking in) on building their data centers. In other words, this isn’t a problem that really needs solving.
@ Elad: The user gets something back: FAROO is sharing revenues with the users. Plus they get a ranking much more immune to spam, because its based on the “wisdom of crowds”.
Of course Google has enough money to finance huge date centers. But also for them it would be better to turn this money into profit. And for the competition, especialy for new entrants there existed up to noe and huge market entry barrier due to this costs.
So you post video’s on a video sharing website? Only about a million people in the world understand that most video sharing websites don’t show fullscreen videos and only video’s of about 10 minutes length. These are the people who actually look at any technology/product/service minutely under the lens. Mermaid is for them. Mermaid is a suite of Global Broadcast products. They are based on absolutly serverless P2P technology. Which means absolutly no central monitoring or control. No Censorship=> Free Speech. This is the world of tomorrow. Where everyone is directly connected to everyone else without using any servers. Server based technology cannot scale to even 1/10th of global population’s usage. Thats the catch. People who understand these limitations and that Mermaid products can be used on a corporate lan as easily as on the internet without any modification or configuration changes. Now organisations can conduct online meetings worldwide or on their network with all their 1,00,000 employees spread throughout the world. News is pushed onto every computer on the planet, on your private network within seconds of being published…
Welcome to the revolution and its free for everyone and its called MetaASO Mermaid http://mermaid.metaaso.com
Hello. I think you are eactly thinking like Sukrat. I really loved the post.