Hopeful Distributed Search Engine Buzzin' Around the Net

HyperBee (http://www.hyperbee.com/ ) is a hopeful distributed search engine. What is a distributed search engine? You may have heard about the Seti@Home computer program. It's a screensaver that you download. When it activates, it downloads a chunk of data from SETI to your computer and "processes" it. When it's done, your computer sends the processed information back to SETI and gets some more. The more people who participate, the more computing power SETI has to help process the radio signals it gets. (HowStuffWorks has a more thorough explanation at http://www.howstuffworks.com/question204.htm .)

HyperBee wants to use your spare computing power, only they want to search the Web with it. You download a screensaver from HyperBee to participate. When it activates, it visits the HyperBee server, pulls down a list of sites to be crawled, and crawls 'em. Alas, HyperBee does not currently have a search engine on its site, though the results page does give statistics about how many pages have been crawled, how many URLs have been seen/visited, and how much time has been donated. There are only 19 volunteers so far.

If you're interested in volunteering, you'll need Windows 95 or later and WinSock 2 or later. There's a FAQ on the site and a PDF presentation (which says something about only crawling .edu domains?)

Interesting idea. One to watch.

Posted to Search Engines-Various