Edgios.com is new kind of distributed search engine, or peer-to-peer search engine, which will be soon introduced to millions of Web users.
P2P Search, Distributed Search, Community Search = User Base!
Distributed search engine concept is not new, I read some posts about this approach to Web search four years ago, and my opinion about it that it is very interesting concept regarding breaking the monopoles in search engines industry by using p2p technology as the search platform, instead of proprietary web crawlers, thousands of SE’s servers, etc. But, I did not read about some successful p2p SE’s in any mainstream media, nor blogs. Will Edgios.com be the breaker of that? Maybe!
Edgios.com follows the basic rules of p2p distributed search engines platform, which means that it is basically community search engine. Community search engines are dependable of a user base volume, which means that a user base has to be built. And, it is not easy – In fact that is also the basic concept of social media. We are living in the time of various social media, and maybe that can be the benefit of new p2p search engines.
One of not very often told stories about Google.com success starts in 1994, when a group of college students start to use search engine prototype, later known as Google. Until 1999 Google user base was pretty big, those persons used Google for several years, and that was the greatest capital of Google success. Believe it, or not.
Edgios.com Strengths and Weaknesses
Edgios.com is in Alpha phase, and there is still not a lot of users, which means that search results are not very good at the moment. You have to install software that watch your web surfing, which means that all of your security software will be alarmed. You have to trust them that it is anonymous, that they have strictly privacy rules… And, there will be a lot of issues related to Web users who are not in the position to change the security rules of the computers they use (e.g. large networks of computers). But, it works.
It is in test phase, and I think that better design is needed, but for now it is not so important.
Edgios is a US company, based in Palo Alto, CA. The company is backed by Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ), a premier Venture Capital firm based in Menlo Park, CA. DFJ shares with Edgios a passion for distributed computing, having backed Skype (as well as Baidu.com), the most successful P2P startup to date. If they can engage the Skype user base in some way, then…
I would like to see p2p SE’s as the competition of Google. Do you?
Edgios.com: Distributed Search Engine - Yet another Google Killer?,
Another great Peer-to-Peer search engines is FAROO.com in Germany.
It sounds interesting in terms of having anonymity and control over the search results, but I think the only thing the p2p aspect of it does is allow the company to get an infrastructure without having to pay for it.
Thanks for the comments. We are aware of Faroo, always good to have competition going 🙂 Our approach is different from theirs, I won’t go into details here.
Regarding advantages of P2P and distributed approach, in addition to having a terrific cloud built jointly with our users (infrastructure) advantage, an equally important point is that user are a fantastic source for many important aspects of search including ranking, discovery, spam detection etc. Search engines know this, this is why they insist on keeping your search histories – we simply want to make this process more transparent and open and tell user that their user attention data is valuable and they should have control over it.
Hi,
I’m an Estonian journalist and I made an interview with Steve Jurvetson is US. He told about you, that you are serbian very smart serbian guys 🙂 Concratulatons!
But how will be the company be named in US – WAUD or VAUD?
Thanks,
Annika Matson