Gosia Garbe, Faroo.com @ TMT.Communities'09 Warsaw

FAROO

P2P search engines - back to direct democracy.

Warsaw- June 18, 2009

Gosia Garbe

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Internet was intendet as a networkof equal rights users.

- Decentral- Democratic

The origins of the internet

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Internet dominated by central institutions,users are communicating through middleman .

Giant, centralized data center absorb private data of internet users, like black holes.

Today

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Web: Network of independent Servers (by Hyperlinks and HTTP) Trend: proprietary cloud services trade convenience for independence

Mail: Network of independent Servers Trend: centralized solutions like Wave

Usenet Newsgroups: Network of independent Servers Trend: walled gardens of centralized social networks

Internet Relay Chat (IRC): Network of independent Servers Trend: walled, centralized Instant Messengers

Software distribution: Decentralized, full control of distribution chain Trend: centralized appstores degrade developer to commission recipient

Search -Centralized data centers Should we store the entire Internet to a single system?

The Internet - a decentralized origin, and an alarming trend

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Choice and plurality of information are base for democracy.What if one company would control 70% of all TV stations worldwide?

A decade in search - time to act!

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P2P Search = Declaration of Independence

1.6 billion Internet users1% of it‘s computers capacity would equal 16 million servers.

This 30 times more than the big search engines have today.

Independent, user powered, democratic search is possible!

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more Hard disc space (x10),

more Processor power (x10),

more Memory (x10),

more Bandwidth (x10),

longer Online times,

more Users (x2)

Hardware and Internet growth for the next 5 – 10 years !

P2P Search scales organically

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FAROO is completely different

We are connecting people, in order to build a global search engine, made of their computers.

No central index, no central crawler, no central search, and no central search log file are required anymore.

We don’t need any hardware at all, which means saving of at least a billion dollar a year for a global scale search engine.

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Another change – the crawler…

Every web page visited by one of our users is automatically included into our distributed index.

Pages are indexed instantly and in real time.

Wisdom of crowds is used for attention based Ranking across all visited web pages.

This leads to a democratic, user centric ranking, while resistant against rank manipulation.

For the first time the ranking of the web pages is automatically done by the target audience itself.

… You are ranking while browsing

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Last but not least: Privacy.

• You know it! Search engines are logging queries and collecting click streams. There are huge repositories of private data build up.

But nobody knows, who will gain access to this data in the future.

• We were looking for a solution where we can provide both: Personalisation and privacy.

• We are also looking at click streams, but these data is not leaving the personal computer at any time and it is not stored in a central repository. There are no search log files as well. Search queries and the distributed index are encrypted.

So we can guarantee an almost 100% privacy for the user.

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P2P Search – The benefits

Decentralisation–no single point of failure & political influence–better privacy

Democratisation–ranking as voting with 100% participation

Cost efficiency–by recycling of unused ressources

P2P Search is benefitial – for user and operator

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Vote for privacy & democracy in search - Join us