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P2P Web searches

prostoalex writes "Researchers at UCLA are looking for easier ways to implement Web searches by using peer-to-peer techniques to decrease the workload. 'Queries need to be passed along only a few links rather than flooded throughout the network, which keeps search-related traffic low,' reports Technology Research News."

6 of 80 comments (clear)

  1. islands of users by bodrell · · Score: 2, Informative

    That wouldn't solve the problem of local areas of users that are disconnected from everyone but themselves. I know this is an issue with other p2p apps. You can only connect to someone who's in your area, and sometimes that just isn't good enough. I know China is in many respects isolated from the rest of the internet.

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    Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a soportar Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a espabilar
  2. Re:Last time I checked, by LostCluster · · Score: 4, Informative

    Not to mention, Google is often better at searching a given website than the search untility a site tries to provide on its own. TechTV host Leo Laporte used to frequently searching Google with the "Site:techtv.com" marker included to find deeply-hidden articles on the site, because it'd be easier to search that way than using TechTV's own search boxes.

    Google's even encuraging this behavior by linking their free websearch feature with their AdSense service, and giving publishers a share of the AdWords revenue when a search that came from their site results in an ad click.

  3. Re:I foresee.. by Phleg · · Score: 2, Informative

    Google is such a distributed computing network that when a single computer in a cluster fails, they've discovered that it'd cost them more to go to the broken node and repair it than the vaule of the computing resources they've lost.

    This is nothing more than just a myth. They continually have job postings looking for Data Center Technicians, whose entire job is to crawl through their massive cluster and repair downed nodes. I should know, I interviewed for the position just a month or two ago.

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    No comment.
  4. Re:Last time I checked, by Deep+Fried+Geekboy · · Score: 1, Informative

    Correctamundo! In fact the google search is a very efficient way of searching sites. Wikipedia uses this to great advantage if your keyword search fails. A big advantage is that frequent googlers have a good sense of how to word the query for maximum valid results.

    I am just about to put a 50,000 message mailing list archive online and the search facility will be Google, which is far better than any of the other solutions I've investigated.

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    I'm not wrong. You haven't thought about it hard enough.

  5. Re:I foresee.. by jackbird · · Score: 2, Informative
    Sad to see it gone.

    me too.

  6. Re:An alternative idea for complete indexing.... by otisg · · Score: 2, Informative

    This, or something akeen to this has already been tried years ago with Harvest and its SOIF records (I think that was the name). The idea was to index locally, while being a part of a larger index network. Obviously, it never worked.

    There is a mailing list for people involved with writing and running web crawlers (aka spider or robots), and several years ago there was a lot of talk about making crawling and indexing more efficient by enchancing the 'robot exclusion protocol' (i.e. robots.txt) by creating a system in which sites would advertize what pages have changed, so that web crawlers could do less crawling and poking around (read wasting time, bandwidth, CPU power, electricity, etc.) and just pick up the pages that needed to be (re)indexed. That was never realized either.

    Over time corporations that run search engines have become more and more closed and protective of their propriatory technology and practices, which gives them the edge in our highly competitive world. Who can blame them. As the result, it is more and more difficult to enhance things like 'robots exclusion protocol', as it requires open talk, agreements, etc.

    Ah.... this makes me said, I'll stop reminiscing.

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    Simpy