The Seattle company's Pandango search system, still in development, combines peer-to-peer networking technology with collaborative filtering - like a highly distributed version of the popular Google search engine. Pandango is similar to Gnutella, the peer-to-peer software designed to trade files. However, it searches for Web sites, not MP3 files. Pandango scans through the indexes of recently visited Web pages on up to 1 million computers, returning the best hits.
I5 Digital's executives are convinced Pandango will provide much fresher and more relevant results than traditional search engines, because it executes real-time searches against constantly updated personal indexes. "We're going to have a better solution than Google for searching the Web," said Liad Meidar, chairman and chief executive of i5 Digital. "This is like sticking your head out your window and yelling to your neighbors, 'Hey, where should I look to find information on mortgages?'"
Naturally, the traditional search engines beg to differ. Craig Silverstein, Google's director of technology, said peer-to-peer technology presents interesting possibilities for search, but he said it has serious shortcomings today. For one thing, there's an incentive for people to cheat. People who want their sites to turn up most frequently will try to skew the results, he said. Also, Silverstein said, a peer-to-peer system that searches 1 million computers is bound to be much slower than Google's half-second search.
I5 Digital acknowledged that the primary challenge will be making the search as fast as possible. Brian Hutchison, i5 Digital's director of engineering, said Pandango already uses a very efficient search protocol based on eXtensible Markup Language that transfers only about 28 bytes per query. "We're working to make sure we have the right balance between returning a quick result and getting deep searches," Hutchison said.
In the fast-fermenting world of peer-to-peer development, Pandango isn't alone. Other companies are exploring the uses of peer-to-peer in search, such as Gonesilent.com -formerly known as InfraSearch - started by Gnutella developer Gene Kan.
