Jeff Walzer's Bookmarks tagged business →  View Popular

"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."

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.

The 3 big hurdles are:





1. 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.
   
2. 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.
   
3. 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.