Distributed search engine

A distributed search engine is a search engine where there is no central server. Unlike traditional centralized search engines, work such as crawling, data mining, indexing, and query processing is distributed among several peers in a decentralized manner where there is no single point of control.

In April 2000 three programmers (one of them was Gene Kan) built a prototype P2P web search engine based on Gnutella called InfraSearch. It was meant to run inside the participating websites' databases creating a P2P network that could be accessed through the InfraSearch website.

On May 31, 2000 Steelbridge Inc. announced development of OpenCOLA a collaborative distributive open source search engine. It runs on the user's computer and crawls the web pages and links the user puts in their opencola folder and shares resulting index over its P2P network.

On December 15, 2003 Michael Christen announced development of a P2P-based search engine, eventually named YaCy, on the heise online forums.

In February 2001 Wolf Garbe published an idea of a peer-to-peer search engine, started the Faroo prototype in 2004, and released it in 2005.

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Wikipedia