Startup Webaroo to put the 'Web on a Hard Drive'?

An anonymous reader writes "A new startup called Webaroo is launching Monday with an audacious proposition: You can search the Web without a net connection of any kind. Initial release consists of 'Web packs' on specific topics such as news, city guides or Wikipedia. Later this year they're promising a full-Web version that you can carry on a laptop -- provided you're willing to devote something in the neighborhood of 80 gig."

Comments

sounds great

[sentientbeing]

I'm sold. Does anyone have the .torrent for it?

Re:sounds great

[Red Alastor]

I'm sold. Does anyone have the .torrent for it?

Me too ! Do you think we can subscribe to a service to get updates when the content change ?

Re:sounds great

[cgenman]

I don't have a lot of hard drive space. It would be really convienient for me if they just put the packs online.

Dotcom v3.0

[Saven Marek]

A new startup called Webaroo is launching Monday with an audacious proposition: You can search the Web without a net connection of any kind.

If anyone doubted the next dotcom boom is upon us, this should put that doubt to rest.

Re:Dotcom v3.0

[caffeinemessiah]

I was JUST thinking that. This seems like the beginning of a whole slew of semi-ridiculous ideas that get funded because their proponents seem 'ahead of their time'. Did someone at a funding company not think of the following two points:

1) the web is growing at a phenomenal rate. in a few years, the only thing that you'll be able to fit on even high-density media is very narrow, specific content. is there really such a huge market for that?

2) wifi is nearly ubiquitous. why pay for a static snapshot of the web that will be obsolete in a few days when you can walk into a starbucks with you laptop and get the fresh stuff almost for free??

I'm sure the guys who want to put the web on a disk have thought these points through, but me...I just really want to sigh. and buy some short-term stocks.

Re:Dotcom v3.0

[Bogtha]

wifi is nearly ubiquitous.

I think you're way off on this one. On the other hand, I have a suitable substitute:

2. What the hell are they going to do about the copyright issues?

Re:Dotcom v3.0

[Philocke Fox]

Robert X. Cringley had an article about this last year. http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20050210. html

Basically what he said was that venture capitalists raised a whole bunch of money that they didn't spend during the last boom. This money is raised from investors and is given to the VCs for a limited time. The VCs make money from the management fees they collect for dealing with this money, usually 1 or 2% of the total amount. But, if they don't invest, then the money AND the fees get sent back to the original investors.

The time limit on investment is usually about 10 years. So if we say that the boom started around '96, then some of these limits have already expired, and the rest of them will expire within the next 4 years.

Use it or lose it. And the VCs will definitely use it.

Re:Dotcom v3.0

[Xeriar]

What the hell are they going to do about the copyright issues?

Quoted for truth. I know I'm not the only one who thought "Hey, this would be cool... but the target websites are going to be pissed about losing their ad revenue."

For sites like Wikipedia and others whose goal is the distribution of their content, this isn't as much of a big deal (unless, in the case of Wikipedia, they snapshot a vandalized site...), but a lot of content providers won't be happy about getting their ad revenue stolen.

Re:Dotcom v3.0

[flyingsquid]

I was JUST thinking that. This seems like the beginning of a whole slew of semi-ridiculous ideas that get funded because their proponents seem 'ahead of their time'

In related news, NewsCorp bought Myspace.com for 580 million.

Sounds like a cache to me

[liliafan]

After reading the article, it sounds like they are just selling their web cache, nice idea but really unless they are selling really cheap I just can't see it picking up, especially considering the difficulties of getting the data to your drive, I mean an 80G download!

Additionally what if I decide to follow site links that leave the cache?

Yeah I can't really see this picking up.

ah yes remember the day

[minus_273]

when someone asked if the internet will fit on a floppy?

Re:ah yes remember the day

[jeroenb]

I remember somewhere halfway through the 90s that a co-worker who did research into search technologies got the "idea" to just crawl the web looking for references to stuff you were interested in. It was pretty obvious, but he wanted to back everything up in case he wanted to recrawl it searching for something else.

One day our internet connection was down and we went up to him asking: "the net connection is down, could we use your internet backup instead?" He was not amused, we were :)

Come to think of it, I'm not sure what he's up to nowadays...

Re:ah yes remember the day

[fracex]

I remember when I was convinced that the entire interent came on one of those AOL floppies.

Mind you I think I was 7 years old at the time.

ownership

[xzvf]

Wouldn't there be an issue here of selling another person's content? While everyone can view the content at will, copying that information to media and then reselling it, or even distributing it for free, would be an issue.

What about important updates?

[KenDodd]

For example, where do we get the porn diffs?

How are they going to handle dynamic things..

[Idimmu Xul]

e.g. searching? Having Wikipedia on your hdd is all well and good, but if you can't easily search it, what's the point?

All of the Web on a laptop?

[omeg]

"The Internet Archive Wayback Machine contains approximately 1 petabyte of data and is currently growing at a rate of 20 terabytes per month. This eclipses the amount of text contained in the world's largest libraries, including the Library of Congress. If you tried to place the entire contents of the archive onto floppy disks (we don't recommend this!) and laid them end to end, it would stretch from New York, past Los Angeles, and halfway to Hawaii."

Internet Archive Frequently Asked Questions

Hm..

[Anonymous Coward]

Only if one of the webpacks is porn. Or better yet, if several are porn, cross referenced by type and participants.

Though, my vaguely disturbing ramblings do raise an interesting point, maybe - what's their stance on the indecent materials that make up a good deal of teh webernet? When they say the "whole internet," do they MEAN goatse too?

Re:Hm..

[AndroidCat]

I think goatse would be under "hole internet".

Re:Hm..

[edbulldog]

The only way one can store the "whole internet" in a 80GB drive is to drop off the pr0n. I mean... besides the pr0n, everything else should fit in a 80GB drive, right?

Pr0n?

[Dante Shamest]

Would the downloadable content include porn?

Er, I'm asking this in order to, er, protect my girlfriend's sensibilities. Can't have her unwittingly downloading such naughty stuff you know. =)

Re:80 gig web?

[hlh_nospam]

No images and compression on the text would probably change that quite a bit.

Not enough so's you'd notice. What's the difference between one thimbleful of ocean and 100 thimblefuls of ocean? Besides trying to solve the wrong problem to begin with?

Re:Copyright infringment.

[tepples]

How soon till the first lawsuit is filed.

US copyright law, 17 USC 512, excuses operators of automated caches that conform to established cache control protocols (meta elements, /robots.txt, etc.) from copyright infringement liability.

Cache exemption

[tepples]

Technically, they make a copy and the ISP doesn't.

Isn't the ephemeral copy in the RAM of a router still a copy? And don't operators of automated caches have a fairly broad exemption under United States copyright law, 17 USC 512(b)?

Is this even legal?

[sunwolf]

How are they to justify selling other peoples' websites? What about the sites' lost ad revenues?

Could just work...

[ELProphet]

But not in the way they think. TFA mentions two points, but doesn't explore them in depth. The first is their algorithms they use; let's face it, Google is starting to fall to the SEOs. If they have a new algorithm that was able to actually follow your web browsing all the way, they'd be able to provide much better results. Google claims to do this, but they can't follow you more than your first link. Second, they seem to pick up that most people find their entire information on the second or think link they visit.

Combine these together, and the program could offer you 80 gigs of data to just sit on your computer and be sifted through at yuor leisure. It would be able to follow you through, and find exactly how you get through your data. When it needs to, it can spider into areas that it might think you'd want to go (Been looking at a lok of Wikipedia? Next time you connect, it goes an picks up some wikibooks).

The best part, is that all the "Big Brother" information is being stored on YOUR computer, not their servers. You want that info, Bush? You'll have to supoena every user.

If they tergeted this more towards a desktop-search type thing with better search algos than Google, this could just work.

a nice service is possible.

[twitter]

The wayback machine's terrabytes of data is what this really takes. Keeping it up to date is another story.

Archives are good and this can be a useful service. Providing 80 select gigs on a hard drive to libraries and schools is a useful until US networks get where they should be. Their software can keep those 80 GB up to snuff at night. When you leave the cache, you ... gasp ... get the new content. In the mean time, things are much faster when it matters. Mirrored content will always be a good idea. Look at the debian distribution system, for example.

Good luck to the people at Webaroo. So long as they don't apply for stupid patents that give them an exclusive franchise to distribution systems, they are AOK.

The road warrior thing will flop, though. People are going to stay where there's a network or pay the $10. It's the one piece of live information that requires the hook up. The speed of the rest is gravy for those people.

feh

[andreyw]

Frankly, I could see a market for this *maybe* 10-12 years ago. It just doesn't make any sense now. The internet is not solely about static content. Also, the thimble of data provided in each pack will be underwhelming and perpetually out of date.

I mean, if I know I won't be online for a week, what stops me from just CURLing or WGETing whatever I plan on reading for the next couple of weeks? And that goes only for static content like books and articles. Everything else is cannot be simply cached.

Re:Transoceanic flights?

[timmyf2371]

I always fly Lufthansa whenever travelling trans-atlantic, providing you're willing to pay the WiFi premium, you get WiFi internet access for the duration of the flight.

For shorter flights within the UK and Europe, it's safe to say I can cope without internet access for two hours.