Gnutella Technology Powers New Search Engine

Matrium writes: "News.com (owned by CNet) is running an article on how the makers of Gnutella have turned their decentralized model of information swapping away from music and porn, and are now looking at search engines. InfraSearch is still in beta, but it does offer an interesting look in the evolution of the Internet." InfraSearch presently paws through only a few search sites, but as a concept really intrigues me. For one thing, it introduces the long-overdue concept of "how long to search" right into the query dialogue.

Comments

Interesting idea with problems

[Kaa]

The idea is interesting, no doubt. However there are three major (from my POV) with it:

(1) An obvious point: if a site itself decides which queries to respond to, there'll be a lot of spamming the index. Doesn't anybody remember the fate of the [meta] tags?

(2) This search technology essentially turns a search into an advertising stream. Since the site decides what to return, it'll return a blurb instead of a context around the match. And if the site can returns graphics and not just text strings... oh, my! Advertising banners as search results! Joy.

(3) The results are going to be dependent on the location of the query. Same question asked from a machine in California is likely to return different results if asked from a machine in Germany (especially with low timeouts). This isn't horrible, but not all that good. In particular, it means that I cannot tell other people "Search for 'foo', you'll find the site I am talking about on the first page".

Out of the three, the first is so obvious, something will be done about it. I don't know what, though. It's the second that worries me most of all. Besides more advertising, there is a basic problem here -- I want to see what the site has, not necessarily what they prefer to show me. To give a trivial example, a company could have a recalls/warnings/manufacturing defects page somewhere on its site to satisfy disclosure requirements, but never return this page to any search.

All in all, I'll stick with Google for the time being, thank you very much.

Kaa

Illicit network

[Hard_Code]

"Unlike Napster, however, it allows people to search for any kind of files; a random sampling of the search terms being used at any given time ranges from MP3s to blockbuster movies to pornography."

"The Department of Transportation released a shocking report this morning, in which it was discovered that the federal highway system, unlike rural routes, allow transportation of any kind of material. A random sampling of items being transported at any given time ranges from pirated music to pirated blockbuster movies, to pornography."