I'm sure this would make hackers oh so happy. How long until someone infects one of these with a nice virus (as it will be surely running windoze). Perhaps you can buy an infected copy of Windoze for a discount?
Rather than generating a random email address to some domain that you own, generate an email address off the IP of the requesting browser/bot/whatever. That way they get to keep their own spam servers busy trying to send spam to their own addresses. Might work for an hour or two...
Given that the security hole is a known problem, why not write a worm which finds unpatched servers and patches them?
Yes, you would want to be sure that you're not unleashing some new death, but it would seem to be a simple way to catch all the lame admins who don't bother to install the update...
My fundamental issue is with the following statement from your investors sections:
"...on what placement they get in Grub's search result sets."
This would imply to me that if I pay money to have my site indexed regularly, my links will be placed higher in priority over other similar links. Yes, many commercial services do this. However, they don't rely on community bandwidth to do their indexing.
The benefit your service would provide to the average user would more reliable searches as the index data is up to date. Mucking with the relevancy of returned data based on corporate funding changes this - in my opinion it makes it much less worthwhile. Hence much less worthwhile for me to provide valuable resources for indexing.
Now, if you were to provide a benefit to the users of your indexing engine other than searching then it would be a different story (perhaps pay them for their services?).
Perhaps we need a mojonation of the search world. If I run a search agent, then I earn mojo/points/dollars/whatever. I can use these later to get faster searches. If I don't provide cpu time/net bandwidth, then I need to provide some other form of input (such as money).
Let me get this straight: they want me to run their client on my machines, using up my cpu and network bandwidth so that they can resell that information to other search engines?
I particularly like this piece from their "Investors" page:
Third, Grub will begin charging website customers for content control. Content control consists of indexing updated information on a regular basis and controlling link placement in search results. Large sites who's revenue depends on sustained inbound web traffic will be charged based on the amount of data that they submit into Grub's database, and on what placement they get in Grub's search result sets.
So basically, the sites who are will to spend the most money will get their url's pushed up to the top of the list. Relevancy be damned.
Someone please tell me why I should dedicate my resources to this?
I think the smartest thing about the whole idea was putting the whole thing under the guise of an "open source", "peer to peer", "distributed", "let's make the world better" search engine. They might have managed to get some real interest if they had done a better job at hiding their financial motives.
Why not make this thing talk to mojonation? That way you could stream everybody's mp3's from all over the net.
RIAA beware!
Hell, go a step further and make a mod_mojo. Provide an easy deployment for mojonation and get around all those pesky firewall issues...
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I'm sure this would make hackers oh so happy. How long until someone infects one of these with a nice virus (as it will be surely running windoze). Perhaps you can buy an infected copy of Windoze for a discount?
May as well paint a giant bullseye on the things.
Rather than generating a random email address to some domain that you own, generate an email address off the IP of the requesting browser/bot/whatever. That way they get to keep their own spam servers busy trying to send spam to their own addresses. Might work for an hour or two...
Given that the security hole is a known problem, why not write a worm which finds unpatched servers and patches them? Yes, you would want to be sure that you're not unleashing some new death, but it would seem to be a simple way to catch all the lame admins who don't bother to install the update...
My fundamental issue is with the following statement from your investors sections:
"...on what placement they get in Grub's search result sets."
This would imply to me that if I pay money to have my site indexed regularly, my links will be placed higher in priority over other similar links. Yes, many commercial services do this. However, they don't rely on community bandwidth to do their indexing.
The benefit your service would provide to the average user would more reliable searches as the index data is up to date. Mucking with the relevancy of returned data based on corporate funding changes this - in my opinion it makes it much less worthwhile. Hence much less worthwhile for me to provide valuable resources for indexing.
Now, if you were to provide a benefit to the users of your indexing engine other than searching then it would be a different story (perhaps pay them for their services?).
Perhaps we need a mojonation of the search world. If I run a search agent, then I earn mojo/points/dollars/whatever. I can use these later to get faster searches. If I don't provide cpu time/net bandwidth, then I need to provide some other form of input (such as money).
Let me get this straight: they want me to run their client on my machines, using up my cpu and network bandwidth so that they can resell that information to other search engines?
I particularly like this piece from their "Investors" page:
Third, Grub will begin charging website customers for content control. Content control consists of indexing updated information on a regular basis and controlling link placement in search results. Large sites who's revenue depends on sustained inbound web traffic will be charged based on the amount of data that they submit into Grub's database, and on what placement they get in Grub's search result sets.
So basically, the sites who are will to spend the most money will get their url's pushed up to the top of the list. Relevancy be damned.
Someone please tell me why I should dedicate my resources to this?
I think the smartest thing about the whole idea was putting the whole thing under the guise of an "open source", "peer to peer", "distributed", "let's make the world better" search engine. They might have managed to get some real interest if they had done a better job at hiding their financial motives.
Why not make this thing talk to mojonation? That way you could stream everybody's mp3's from all over the net. RIAA beware! Hell, go a step further and make a mod_mojo. Provide an easy deployment for mojonation and get around all those pesky firewall issues...