Faroo wants to build a better Google through peer to peer

by Brad Linder Sep 17th 2007

If we've learned anything from Wikipedia and Mahalo, it's that the search engine wars aren't quite over yet. While neither site is a traditional search engine in the vein of Google, Yahoo!, or Ask, they've shown there is more than one day to index information online.

Faroo, on the other hand is developing a product that looks a lot like a typical search engine. Under the hood though, it's quite different. There's no server farm with an index and no webcrawlers. Pages are indexed via peer to peer technology. The site is launching a beta test today in conjunction with the TechCrunch40 conference.

Users install a client on their computers and it tracks websites they visit. Pages are ranked according to their popularity among users. On the one hand, this is a great way to find the most popular websites as determined by actual people. Faroo also plans to share half of its revenue with users.

On the down side, we all visit plenty of useless websites throughout the day and quickly click away. Hopefully the algorithm accounts for this.

The bigger problems are:

Only pages that users visit will be indexed, so if Faroo doesn't have a large enough user base, their index will kind of stink.
Isn't this just piggybacking on Google and other services? Faroo users will search for pages using old fashioned search engines, and when they click through to a result, the page will be indexed by Faroo. So how can we expect the results to be much different?

Despite our concerns, we think the idea shows promise. But we're waiting until the beta starts (later today) before we pass judgment.

Tags: faroo, techcrunch40

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