Six month after launch the FAROO API serves now 24 million queries per month. That is a tenfold increase within the last month.

Keep supporting us, cool new features are coming.

In the previous posts we described our new spelling correction algorithm, announced the release of the c# code as Open Source and presented some pretty compelling benchmark results.

Today we are introducing spelling correction, query completion and an improved instant search as integral part of our FAROO search service:

Spelling correction
For a misspelled term the suggested corrections are displayed in a dropdown list.

Query completion (aka query suggestions, autocomplete)
As you type a dropdown list of popular terms and combinations is displayed, which start with the letters you typed so far.

Improved instant search
Results are automatically displayed for the best suggestion/correction, “Enter” searches always for originally entered term.

Opposite to traditional implementations we are not using a predefined dictionary:

• The whole web serves as a corpus, from which we automatically derive the spelling and completion dictionary.
• The dictionary is automatically updated as part of the indexing process and learns new terms as they appear on the web.
• The whole process is fully automated, no manual auditing steps are involved.

The algorithm is completely language independent (pure statistics, no linguistic knowledge).
Of course corrections and suggestions are given only within the scope of the selected search language.

Try it out at faroo.com

Today we are launching our new iOS App, a fresh and visual take on Search & News.

This is an Universal App, running both on the iPhone and the iPad. And it is FREE. Get it from the AppStore right now.

What’s unique

1. First Web Search App written natively for the iPad .
2. Combines active Search and passive News discovery (News reader).
3. Integrated Text Preview eliminates the web page loading time, provides a uniform design across pages and serves as offline reader.
4. Visual Search Result and Search History streams.
5. Turns any query into a continuous Search Feed

FAROO is the first Web Search App designed for the iPad platform.

The form factor and touch UI, the visual search stream representation, and the combination of Search and News are quite fundamentally changing the search experience.

Try it out and let us know how you like it.

You may have noticed that our home page got a fresh look. After four years, new products and much more users it was long overdue.

It now consistently presents our three core products:

• P2P Search,
• Real-time Search,
• iPad / iPhone App.

With more users, we changed from the pure technology focus towards a more consumer friendly product page.

We hope you like it.

Well, it has been a bit silent on our blog lately.
But for three very good reasons:

Today we announce

• our new iPhone/iPad App, available today from the AppStore,
• the Redesign of our Realtime Search and Homepage,
• a new version of our Distributed Search Client.

We have been working hard for you, so check it out and let us know what you think.

A picture is worth a thousand words. So here is a quick update of our latest improvements of real time relevance, visual result enrichment and result page redesign

Our network just reached 1.7 million peers, global distributed across the continents. This is probably the largest p2p web search grid in the world. This land mark also impressively demonstrates the scalability and maturity of FAROOs technology.

The number of connected computers surpasses even those in the datacenters of the biggest search engines.

Despite the huge number of peers, their global distribution, and the highly dynamic nature of the network, where peers dynamically joining and departing, we are reaching a latency below a second. The searches are fully distributed, without the support of any centralized entity, or any single FAROO owned server or peer involved.

Imagine there are a million volunteers, just waiting to assist you and to answer your questions. They live all over the planet. But you know only a few of them. And now suddenly you have a question, a very urgent one. It has to be answered within one second. And one of your volonteers has the answer, but you don’t know who.

You can’t call them one by one by phone, you even don’t know their number. Or visit them with your private jet, as you don’t know their address. But you can use FAROO, it’s just doing all the magic for you.

FAROO’s search grid is now powered by a combined 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 processor cycles per month. A giant number, right? That’s similar to the number of grains of sand on all the beaches of the planet Earth.

There had been some silence on the blog recently. But for a very good reason. All hands have been needed on deck to push forward our most important project so far. During the last months we did a full redesign of our p2p protocol and storage layer. All aimed at higher speed and better efficiency.

Earlier this week when we finished the implementation and updated, it had been really a great moment to see everything working smoothly on the new protocol.

All our performance predictions have come real, and the search latency is truly unique for a such massively distributed and highly dynamic p2p search grid.

The search speed increased 10 times. The storage efficiency doubled and the storage speed increased ten times. The message size and bandwidth requirements have been reduced to 50%.

Now we are reaching a latency below a second, even if the search results are provided from the second side of the planet. From peers that have been selected in real time from out of million highly dynamic peers, fully distributed, without the support of any centralized entity.

That’s why we decided to kick into next gear and give instant search a try. Now search results will appear instantly while you are still typing in your query.

To benefit from all the improvements you will need to upgrade to the new version. We are still giving final touches, but the new FAROO 3.0 release is imminent.