New search engine aims to go where Google can’t

Borislav Agapiev has $50,000 in computer hardware, 25 engineers in his native Serbia and a firm belief that millions of people will lend him their computers and privacy for the purpose of searching the web. That’s enough to take on Google.

“Not only will we be very fresh, but we’ll also be very high quality,” says the founder of Wowd, a search company in Palo Alto, Calif. Unlike Google’s millions of computer processors performing the searches, with Wowd, explains Agapiev, “it’s real people doing the clicking.”

Wowd draws on two tech trends to make something new: a service that delivers a picture of what the Internet looks like right now and an index of what users are most interested in. Agapiev plans to convince people to download his software to their computers, creating a distributed network that will do the searching.

It’s the opposite of Google, whose machines crawl, capture and parse a large section of the Internet. They analyze how pages are related to one another and determine what people are probably looking for now. It works pretty well but misses an enormous amount of data. Google cannot crawl over everything on Craigslist or Facebook or Ebay. It is probably unable to see some 90 per cent of the Internet — the so-called dark web.

Wowd will never get at all that, either — some corporate material is forever off-limits. But with its tracking software on people’s computers (Wowd suggests allowing it 2 gigabytes on your hard drive) and thousands of individuals agreeing to pool their results, Agapiev could have a picture that’s far better than Google’s, delivered right as it happens.

Spam and virus-laden websites won’t show up unless Wowd users visit them often. “When you harness the power of millions of desktops, it’s more powerful than anything you can do in a centralized way,” says Agapiev. Already people download software when joining peer-to-peer networks. Take the cheap phone calls available from Skype; it taps users’ spare computer bandwidth to send encrypted voice packets over the Internet.

Agapiev needs hundreds of thousands of volunteers. Once they use his software, awareness of pages they visit is shared with a handful of machines nearby on the network that keep track of what information is stored where. When someone searches for something, the software queries its neighbors, which ask more neighbors, and so on. Thanks to the power of large-scale networks, no piece of data is ever more than three hops away — at least in theory. Wowd updates whenever a user visits a site, keeping things ultracurrent.

Agapiev, 49, has done search work before. He founded Vast.com in 2000, which powers the search behind companies like Yahoo Travel and AOL Autos. He left in 2006; he saw the popularity of Skype and wanted to do the same with search. Venture capital firms have invested $5 million since 2007 and provided introductions to the big brains in established search. They brought in Mark Drummond, a seasoned tech exec, as chief executive.

Researchers at Google, Yahoo and Ask.com told Agapiev that his idea will not work. Peer-to-peer distribution is not fast enough, they say, and will not penetrate firewalls. They also doubt Wowd can get people to download what really amounts to a voluntary piece of glorified spyware. Wowd executives say they have spent two and a half years making the search work better and faster. Since Wowd launched in October, 70,000 computers have joined its network; 12,000 check in each day — a tiny sliver of its goal.

As Google did, Wowd hopes to gain a loyal following among customers looking for a new way to search the web and then earn money from ads. Wowd insists it is not trying to beat Google at its own game. Search companies Cuil, Powerset and others crowed that their methods were an improvement on Google — but made little headway. “We’re trying do things that we are uniquely good at,” says Drummond.

via ctv