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#2 Deconstructing the TC40: Faroo

#2 in my “deconstructing the TC40″ series (see #1).

Faroo. P2P search.

Summary: DO NOT WANT.

The Proposition: No crawler, no centralized index. Instead, Faroo relies on users (presumably with a browser toolbar); each page a user visits is added to the Faroo distributed index. Visitor metrics gathered across the Faroo network drive rankings in search results.

Value Add: Better search. Advertising revenue shared with users.

Warning Bells: Revenue sharing is commonly a prop to support a core business that doesn’t have the strength to stand on its own. Faroo results will be based on popularity - a poor proxy for either quality or relevance. Similarly, Faroo’s results will be a thin slice of the net. Finally: Faroo’s website talks about Faroo as an alternative to [Google’s] “info monopoly” - mixing “information wants to be free!!1!” politics with business is a warning sign about the company’s readiness to compete on the main stage. Basically no barriers to entry.

Death Knell: Both del.icio.us and StumbleUpon could build out similar “social search” functionality around their indexes very quickly if the concept got any traction.

faroo, google, search, tc20, tc40 techcrunch

2 Responses to “#2 Deconstructing the TC40: Faroo”

wolf | September 19th, 2007 at 10:27 am

FAROO critics deconstructed

> Revenue sharing is commonly a prop to support a
> core business that doesn’t have the strength to stand > on its own.

Take a different perspective: search is a huge market, many people would like to have a share of it, its impossible for the average single person to compete. FAROO provides a tool that joins their forces.

> FAROO results will be based on popularity - a poor
> proxy for either quality or relevance.

PageRank is based on popularity of a page among webmasters, FAROO’s PeerRank is based on popularity of a page among all users

> Similarly, Faroo’s results will be a thin slice of
> the net.

FAROO will do an initial crawling to overcome the chicken or the egg problem.

> Faroo’s website talks about Faroo as an alternative
> to [Google’s] “info monopoly” - mixing “information
> wants to be free!!1!” politics with business is a
> warning sign about the company’s readiness to compete
> on the main stage.

What’s wrong when a business cares what people are concerned about?
Besides this, business and politics are not separated. For most markets there exist anti-trust laws.

> Basically no barriers to entry.

There is quite a huge entry barrier to copycat p2p technology for web search as well as investing in hundreds of thousands servers for a traditional search engine.

> Death Knell: Both del.icio.us and StumbleUpon
> could build out similar “social search” functionality
> around their indexes very quickly if the concept got
> any traction.

That’s true for the ranking part, but not for the infrastructure saving distributed search. The cost advantage of the latter enables revenue share.

> Summary: DO NOT WANT.
Think again
Rod | September 19th, 2007 at 11:39 am

Wolf - thank-you for stopping by and sharing your thoughts on my dissection - its a welcome counterpoint!

All the best,
–R