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Javed AlamFAROO - Could P2P Search Change the Game?
Written by Bernard Lunn / April 2, 2008 3:00 PM / 15 Comments
Entrepreneurs have learned that pitching anything to investors with "we can beat Google at search" is the kiss of death. -
24 Apr 08
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11 Apr 08
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03 Apr 08
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The game-changing FAROO advantage is not that it is free software, it is their Peer To Peer (P2P) architecture. This can totally change the economics of search.
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"1. The search engine index is based on a real users [sic] browsing habits : That means that web index will not serve those websites on which you don’t spend time thus reducing spam results.
2. The data is not stored anywhere but your own computer and you have the control of your own data. Searching is completely anonymous.
3. As per Faroo’s plans, you’ll be able to earn money from their advertising based revenue model. This is yet not implemented, however, it’s one of their declared plans."
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It is the latter point that is critical. FAROO can do this because they don't have to invest in huge server farms. The search business is about giving a good deal to both publishers and advertisers. You can offer a better deal if your costs are lower.
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By searching, you make FAROO better, so it is quite reasonable to expect a cut of the revenue. And if your search doesn't cost them much, they can share more of that revenue.
If their costs are low, they can reduce the cost of search terms for advertisers, and as Craigslist has discovered, reducing price in a zero cost environment has a dramatic effect on volumes and market share.
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- Can P2P search scale? I am not technically competent enough to answer that question, but I have not yet seen evidence to convince me that it is impossible. The success of other P2P services such as Skype make me willing to at least reserve judgment on this issue.
- The chicken and egg problem, based on the fact that the P2P search index scales with the number of people using FAROO. When I first looked at FAROO last year, this looked like a show-stopper. As the number of searchers is very low right now, people are likely to try it, get lousy results and forget about it. When I revisited FAROO in March, I noticed that they had taken steps to address this. Their solution (not by itself a big deal and used by other alternative engines) is to aggregate search results from other engines in addition to results from FAROO. So you get some results no matter what you're looking for and thus may continue to use the software. This also scales their index faster.
- FAROO, being P2P, requires a client download. That can be an incredibly big hurdle to adoption. When I first looked at FAROO, I thought their best shot was to build on top of existing P2P services such as LimeWire or Gnutella. I now see that they have a fundamentally different strategy. They are building on top of .Net. Oops there go all the Mac and Linux heads... bye. This is potentially a serious issue as lots of early adopters tend to be on the Mac. I am a Mac user, so I could not use FAROO without borrowing somebody's PC. OSX and Linux support is "coming soon." I assume this will be via Mono. Having been so much in the Java world recently, I have no idea how well Mono works in practice.
The 3 big hurdles are:
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FAROO has really addressed the privacy issue as they explain here. It does appear that they have overcome the conflict between personalization and privacy that I wrote about in a previous post on this blog. That is huge. If users feel 100% confident that their privacy is being protected, they will reveal more and thus create a more accurate database of intentions (which will be more useful to advertisers).
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FAROO also appears to have a simple and elegant "implicit web" approach to social search as they explain on their blog. Their key point is that the user does not have to tag or take any other explicit action to take advantage of social search:
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"FAROO utilizes the implicit web to direct the crawler to places the users are interested in, to select, rank and personalize results according to the attention users paid to the content visited, and to implement behavior targeting for advertising based on present and past behavior."
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