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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.