Harman Patil (Editor)

FAROO

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Developer(s)
  
FAROO Limited

Operating system
  
Microsoft Windows

Written in
  
C#

Initial release
  
November 2005; 11 years ago (2005-11)

Stable release
  
3.5.1030 / July 2013; 3 years ago (2013-07)

Platform
  
.NET Framework and Mono

FAROO is a universal web search engine based on peer-to-peer technology. It uses a distributed crawler that stores search data on users' computers instead of a central server. Whenever a user visits a website, it is automatically indexed and distributed to the network. Ranking is done by comparing usage statistics of users, such as web pages visited, amount of time spent on each page, and whether the pages were bookmarked or printed.

Properties

  • FAROO takes user behavior into account when calculating a website's rank, resulting in more relevant search results than traditional search engines can provide (see filter bubble).
  • Because pages are automatically indexed upon being visited, updates to the index are nearly instant.
  • No central servers are required, drastically reducing infrastructure costs and allowing the service to scale infinitely.
  • FAROO plans to share up to 50% of its advertising revenue with its users.
  • The index grows with the user base, so a small user base would result in a small index and therefore inaccurate results.
  • The nature of the service could allow easy manipulation by spammers, although FAROO claims that their algorithms prevent this.

    • References

    FAROO Wikipedia
    (Text) CC BY-SA