FAROO joined the CHORUS P2P Workshop 1P2P4mm, which was colocated with the InfoScale 2008 conference.

This first workshop on peer to peer architectures for multimedia retrieval (1p2p4mm) took place in Vico Equense, Naples, Italy, on June 6 2008. The workshop was arranged by the CHORUS Coordination Action to discuss what challenges must be met and what bottlenecks must be addressed by research and engineering efforts in the near future.

We had a great and intense discussion on the true benefits of p2p for search and on building a joint p2p platform and a better connection between academic and web2.0 communities as possible measures to reach the critical mass (in terms of number of users) and gain traction as a serious alternative approach.

For more information and the position papers of the participants please visit the workshop homepage.

“The Social Side of Search”, a Micro-Unconference initiated by FAROO, took place on April, 25 in the Oracle Booth at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco.

The day before we presented FAROO at the Birds of a Feather (BoF) Session ”People Powered Search”:

People powered search:

Social Networks are very successful, there are social networks for near everything, Only in search you are still on your own? Searching together is natural: Asking friends, family, Experts …

• Why we haven’t social search yet (on large scale)? Chicken-egg problem, Many users required to be useful, First your plain search must be competitive , than you can add features -> costs!
• What could be the benefits? Personalization, benefit from search experience of your community …
• What could be the risks? Spammers, Edit wars, Privacy, locked in community -> alternate opinions get filtered out

Examples of how searching together could benefit - a lot of different flavours:

• Providing Infrastructure (using P2P technology)
• Directing the crawler (websites which often appear in results are crawled more frequently/deeper)
• User generated Ranking (using attention data)
• Annotating results
• Editing results
• Creating results
• Bringing users with similar search interests together ( FAROO Social Search )
• Collaborative Searching: Partitioning search among users
• Personalization using your Social Graph
• Many more …

Collaboration not only between users, but also between social search projects:

Todays social networks have one problem: walled gardens ( possible workaround: open social, friendfeed api ). Would it be possible to define a standard/protocol to have all social search initiatives to work together from begin?

• Can the user take its profile with him?
• Can the user take its attention data/query stream with him?
• Are the privacy settings standardized?
• Can the different search projects exchange index and usage data and use them together, to join their forces? Intense discussion on this topic at Alternative Search Engines Day, a conference hosted by Charles Knight

Of course also beyond the unconference the Web 2.0 Expo was a great place to meet interesting people and look what others are heading for.

San Francisco day …

… and night

The first “Alternative Search Engines Day” took place on April, 21  at the Intercontinental Hotel in San Francisco. The conference was hosted by Charles Knight of AltSearchEngines the day before the Web 2.0 Expo.

We were glad to be invited as it was really amazing to see and discuss the diversity of approaches, all dedicated to one common goal - to challenge the current limits of search.

Opening panel, photo by Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten

 
Charles Knight, Richard MacManus, Nitin Karandikar

Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten from the NEXT web reported live from the event, also covering FAROO.

For a complete coverage of the conference please take also a look at these blog posts: Alternative Search Engines Day - Call For Alts to Band Together , Alternative Search Engines Day, Rock on, Alts! , Alt Search Engine Day Part 1 and Part 2.

For a p2p model it is essentially to share a common vision with your users. Therefore it’s always interesting to see how your ideas are discussed and perceived.

A very encouraging and profound example is the ReadWriteWeb blog post “Could P2P Search Change the Game?” by Bernard Lunn.

 
Additionally here is a short roundup of selected previous blog posts:

• Could P2P Networks Enable a Google Killer?
  Bernard Lunn, ReadWriteWeb
• Faroo opens for public and takes our suggestion!
  ReviewSaurus
• Après Google : les moteurs de recherche P2P ?
  Hubert Guillaud, InternetActu.net
• Featured post: A Private Interview with FAROO
  Kaila Colbin for AltSearchEngines
• Great Debate: Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Search Part I and Part II
  AltSearchEngines
• FAROO: The Social Side of Search
  FAROO blog
• Attention economy, the implicit web and myware
  FAROO blog

FAROO gets exciting new social search network functions.

Combining the two mega trends search and social networks, we try to harness the wisdom of crowds and network effects for search.

Why social search? Because searching today is being alone with your question. There is no conversation at all.
But in the real world you are successful if you are not only silently piling through heaps of documents, but ask your colleges and get hints from your friends.

Many social networks are entertaining. But when it comes to search, recommending and connecting you to people who are working at the same topic at the same time, you are on your own again. Because social networks help you to stay in touch with people you already know, they barely help you finding the right (yet unknown to you) people at the right time.

Why context sensitive search advertising is so successful? Because you are presented the right ads at just the moment when you are interested in a specific topic. Now how it would be, if you were presented not ads, but like-minded people? You got the idea. That’s what FAROO’s social search is all about.

And we reconcile social search AND privacy. Unlock the collective intelligence of a search community of peers without sacrificing your privacy. To use the social features no registration is required. You are using an arbitrary alias or nickname.

We just bring people with same interest together. You can at once communicate with like-minded people, profit from their search experience, follow their discoveries, exchange ideas. But you may decide later if you want to become friends and when to reveal your identity.

FAROO’s Social Search is pure opt-in. It can bring you into conversation. But only if you like.

The social features are in alpha stage yet, but here is a Sneak Peak.

What do you think about it?

From today the private beta test turns to public. The current release marks a milestone, which allows us to open the beta test to a wider audience.

Thank you very much, beta testers, for your support!

We hope you will help us also in the future to further improve FAROO.
Spread the word!

We have been busy to further improve the search experience of our p2p web search engine:

Network Visualization
New geographical P2P network visualization at the search page.

Auto Suggest
New Ajax based query auto suggest.

External Sources
External source integration for additional results, if a query can’t be answered from the distributed index.

Active Crawler
New active, community directed crawler. Crawler start points are derived from searches of the FAROO users.

And much more.

Tell us, what you think, and what are you still missing …

These days the DLD08 Conference - Digital, Live, Design takes place  in Munich.

Chaired by publisher Hubert Burda and investor Joseph Vardi, there are three days packed with panels from a very broad spectrum, but each of them intriguing and inspiring.

We were lucky to be invited to the conference, and we enjoyed discussing und exchanging ideas with likeminded people from all over the world.

Also here in the beautiful, sunny Munich two internet megatrends are omnipresent:  Search and social networks.
Combining both could be the Holy Grail. There are many ways to do it, but probably only few will work out.

After endless experiments the famous inventor Thomas Alva Edison once said: We now know a thousand ways not to build a light bulb. But finally he succeeded.  Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time said Edison.

Good results are most important for search. Most valuable raw material is a well filled index.
Of course in the long run the whole internet should be indexed. In the mean time we may improve search result also with a smaller index, if the crawler is exactly indexing the pages, the users are looking for. In this way for the same index size we may improve its efficiency.

This is exactly what our new active, community directed crawler is intended for. Additional to crawling visited pages, FAROO is now able to crawl autonomously.  Crawler start points are derived from visited pages and searches of the FAROO users. If a search returns only few or no results, pages are crawled in real-time and included in the results of that search. While searching the community directed crawler increases the index exactly there where it’s needed. If there are missing results, gaps are instantly closed.

Active crawling increases the index size at faster pace and overcomes the chicken egg problem when crawling only visited pages with relatively few users. By active crawling also passive peers may contribute. Increasing the index becomes independent from browsing activity, in this way also pages get indexed which nobody from the current FAROO community visited before.

The improved efficiency and speed of crawling and indexing will provide you with richer results every day.

The OpenSearch technology allows an easy integration of FAROO into the search bar of your browser or a third party search client.

The OpenSearch Description XML file identifies and describes a search engine.  The OpenSearch “Auto-discovery” signals the presence of a searchplugin link to the user. This Auto-discovery feature is embedded into the FAROO home page and search page.

Now you can search with FAROO right away from the search bar of Firefox or Internet Explorer 7.