Wowd, currently in Beta phase, is a search engine that helps users to discover what is popular on the Web.
However, Wowd’s search technology demonstrated to a very wide users that searching on the Web can works well on a peer to peer service principle.
In fact, Wowd’s primary founding idea was derived from Skype’s model. Unlike the leading search engine Google’s million of computer processors, Wowd want users to download its software to their computers in order to create a distributed network that will do the searching, as well as to distribute the Web pages they visited amongst all the Wowd users.
In this way, peer to peer data searching and sharing, no matter where its original Web page resided in; the Web pages will be pooled to the open search results that will benefit all of the Wowd’s users. Think of a Facebook public album that is currently can’t crawled by Google, when a Wowd user visited it, this particular Facebook album will show up on Wowd’s search result whenever a user want to search Facebook album.
For the users to get started in peer to peer searching; after the user downloading the software, Wowd suggests a user to reserve 2 gigabytes on hard drive so that the Web pages he / she visited can be stored and Wowd will update the visited Web pages accordingly. On the other hand, when a user searches for something, the software will then queries its neighbors, which ask for more neighbors, and so on, until the right search result is met.
However, on the downside, some said peer to peer searching will not work as this method is not fast enough and will not penetrate firewalls. Meanwhile, they also doubt how Wowd can convince people to download what really amounts to a voluntary piece of glorified spyware to their computers.
