
Faroo Employs P2P Technology to Search and Index the Web - usablecontent
http://startupmeme.com/2007/05/14/faroo-employees-p2p-technology-to-search-and-index-the-web/
======
aristus
I wish 'em luck but distributed searching is a tarpit with four fundamental
problems.

One is speed: a search may touch on many 'shards' that then have to be
combined and ranked somewhere. That's hard enough to do when you have 100K
machines linked with 100Mbps up and down.

The second is honesty: search ranking is a high-value target. It's ripe for a
takeover by zombies, even if each node's keyspace is assigned by some trusted
authority.

The third is coordinating a web-wide crawler: how to avoid floods, duplicate
work, spammy submissions, etc.

The fourth is most important: the system has to work _much better_ than Google
for people to care enough to use it. Simply being P2P (i.e. cheaper for the
operator) is not enough.

