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The Internet

A Search Engine For The Slower Net 309

Posted by timothy from the most-everyone-most-everywhere dept.
Makarand writes "According to this BBC News article researchers at MIT are developing a search engine for people using the web on slower net connections. The software will e-mail queries to a central server and receive the most relevant webpages from the search results by e-mail in a compressed form. Since the program is too big to download over a poor net connection it will be mailed on CDs to libraries for people to borrow and install. They are also considering trying to persuade computer sellers in developing countries to install the program on machines."
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A Search Engine For The Slower Net More

A Search Engine For The Slower Net

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  • Them Modem Linkers (Score:4, Funny)

    by inertia187 ( 156602 ) * on Wednesday July 16, 2003 @03:31PM (#6455251) Homepage Journal
    About them Modem Linkers,
    ain't they kinda odd?
    Goin' on the net,
    with they little baud.
    Look at all those Modem Linkers,
    what a thing to see.
    Web sites come up really slow,
    get's lousy Voice/IP.
    Internet at low bit rates,
    what a dawgon mess.
    Load a web site, take a break,
    while 'pache mods compress.
    How to be a Modem Linker,
    don't need a ticket.
    Get a local ISP,
    dial up and link it.

  • Slow people have rights too (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I know the Internet is complicated - but there's no need to pick on slow people.
    • I was on 56K untill 2 months ago when I picked up 128K DSL for the same price.. Google is fast enough for me on that. I do sit on a T1 at work, and use google alot there. And I have no problem going home and using Google on my "slower connection" People just need to learn fscking wait.

      Anyways.. We should pick on the people with slow sites that need to move their webserver off of their momma's 14.4 and get it on something a bit faster. :-)

  • A better idea (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 16, 2003 @03:33PM (#6455262)
    Maybe we could have all webpages categorized by a number, something like 800 for science or whatever, and then we could have a filing cabinet with index cards in it. Then, people could open the filing cabinet, see a number for the page they want and then go directly to the page.

  • What program? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by drdale ( 677421 )
    Could anyone else figure out why this requires a program on the user's end that is too large to be downloaded? Seems like all you need is an e-mail client, and instructions on how to format the information request.
    • I was thinking the same thing! The only thing I can figure is, maybe it is part of some fancy all-in-one mail gateway and web caching system that gets installed on the server.
      • Because they're users. The average user doesn't understand a listserv command, and just sends a message "Hey, could somebody unsubscribe me from this list?" to the posting (and not the request) address.

    • Re:What program? (Score:4, Informative)

      by BillThies ( 690098 ) on Wednesday July 16, 2003 @10:43PM (#6458270)
      Hi, I'm a graduate student working on the TEK project.

      There are several benefits of having a TEK Client program instead of just using email. But first off, the client isn't that big -- the JAR file with the TEK classes is 125 KB. When we package it up with third-party libraries and an installer, it comes to 2 MB, and with Java included, it's 10 MB. It would be interesting to try to prune down this distribution to the minimal size -- for the prototype version, we have focussed primarily on the software's functionality.

      The TEK Client program is useful because it provides a seamless interface to browsing the downloaded pages. It operates as a web proxy: users adjust their browser to talk to TEK instead of the web, and then they can view pages just as if they were connected. The URL's appear as usual in the browser's "location" toolbar, and links on the page are functional. If a URL has been downloaded before, then it is loaded out of the local cache; if it has not yet been downloaded, then the user is queried to submit a request for that URL.

      The TEK Client includes a local search utility for searching the cache of downloaded pages. In this way, the user can build up a local library of information that is relevant to their community; for example, in a school setting, many searches could be satisfied using only the local cache due to overlapping interests of students.

      Also, the TEK Client is useful for tracking searches. In settings where connectivity is intermittent, searches can be enqueued during the day and sent at night (or when a connection is available.) The client also provides basic user management so that multiple people can share a public installation (perhaps using a single email address, which they might not own themselves) and still keep track of their own queries.

      In the future, we think there are a lot of features that could be added to the client. For instance, we could seed the client with other open-source resources, such as an atlas or encyclopedia, that could be used in conjunction with web searches. There could also be an "intelligent query builder" that helps construct Internet searches (for example, by checking spelling) before going through the time and expense of connecting and sending them off.

      Many more details about TEK are available from the TEK Homepage [sourceforge.net]. We are currently moving our CVS source tree to SourceForge, so if you're interested in helping to improve the software, it'd be great to hear from you!

  • Perfect for those people... (Score:3, Funny)

    by fpp ( 614761 ) on Wednesday July 16, 2003 @03:36PM (#6455288)
    ...still surfing the internet with their Commodore 64s and 300 baud modems!

  • Hmmm. (Score:5, Funny)

    by teamhasnoi ( 554944 ) * <teamhasnoi AT yahoo DOT com> on Wednesday July 16, 2003 @03:36PM (#6455289) Journal
    Seems like a long time to wait for porn.

    http://www.mshiltonj.com/sr/

    • Re:Hmmm. (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Mysticalfruit ( 533341 )
      Seriously... something tells me that the serious push for broadband wasn't so grandma could do her geneology research faster... Someone once said that every advancement in media technology only came of age because it could be used to transmit porn.

      Now, take a good hard look at your cubemate. You know what they do when they get home... and it's not BF1942... probably gives you good insight into their test bench naming conventions...
      • Now, take a good hard look at your cubemate. You know what they do when they get home... and it's not BF1942... probably gives you good insight into their test bench naming conventions...

        You have to share a cube with someone? And it's most likely they spend their nights downloading porn? I really don't want to ever end up working wherever you work.

        On a more seriously joking matter, where the fuck are these people? I've worked in quite a few places and I've only met a few people with the neon signs hov
        • I would think that most "pornmonger" types DON'T have the neon signs...more likely they don't tell anyone in the real world and possibly not even anyone in the virtual world...

    • Re:Hmmm. (Score:3, Funny)

      by humming ( 24596 )
      I remember how long it could take to get home porn through ftp-mail back in my university days... But it was worth it, dammit.

      Ah, the time when we got USENET access... All those hours sitting and waiting for the 'You have new mail.' message was over and porn could be reached almost instantly at alt.pictures.celebs[*].

      --H
      [*] Name may not be accurate.

  • Cached searches (Score:5, Interesting)

    by T5 ( 308759 ) on Wednesday July 16, 2003 @03:37PM (#6455295)
    Might be a nice way to preserve searches for later perusal. Unlike bookmarking, the returned search results are stored in an email.

    This would be a good way to preserve stuff that may be the subject of removal due to court order, like xenu.net and other similar de-Googlings.

  • Hey! (Score:3, Funny)

    by Quasar1999 ( 520073 ) on Wednesday July 16, 2003 @03:37PM (#6455298) Journal
    MIT guys! Why don't you put your brain into better compression technology? So we can deliver higher bandwidth to those still on crappy 56K lines?

    And don't say it isn't doable... If I had the time, I could do it, and I'm a mere highschool graduate...
    • If I had the time, I could do it...

      Yeah, but those Tivo'd American Idols aren't watching themselves, are they?
    • We do have higher bandwidth on phone lines. It's called DSL.
      • We do have higher bandwidth on phone lines. It's called DSL.

        SHHH!!! Don't tell... I was planning on making millions! You damn near let the cat outta the bag... now how much do I have to pay you to keep you quiet? ;)

    • MIT guys! Why don't you put your brain into better compression technology?

      And don't say it isn't doable... If I had the time, I could do it, and I'm a mere highschool graduate...

      Spoken like somebody who doesn't have a clue what he's talking about. I'm sure there'd be a fair chunk of money involved if somebody manages to deliver substantially better than 2:1 lossless compression on text, photos, and/or sound...hell, it'd probably be good for a Turing Award, if it's verifiable. It's something that the

      • Re:Hey! (Score:3, Informative)

        by Natalie's Hot Grits ( 241348 )
        Ever heard of PNG,GIF,Animated PNG/GIF? these are formats for both images and video, that are 100% lossless, and better than a 2:1 compression ratio on most video and images (High resolution images with many colors are not great compression ratio but in the average case 2:1 is very very very very doable)

        As for video, animated PNG is a PNG compression of the Diff's of the second frame to the first, third to the second, etc etc.. In the case of video, compression ratios are on the order of 100:1 and audio is
    • MIT guys! Why don't you put your brain into better compression technology? So we can deliver higher bandwidth to those still on crappy 56K lines?

      Well, herein lies the problem. Compression on modems (now the V.90 and V.92 standards) must satisfy three things: a) low-latency; b) low-processor demand; c) linear. A modem can only look at a very little snippet of data (usually what's in the FIFO buffer) and compress that. Even when it compresses it, it has to do so quickly and serially. The reason compressi

  • Is that someone else has judgement over what is to be considered most relevant. Sure you can pick from the sources they give you, but who's to say that the information they give you isn't filtered in some way?

  • Great!! I so need that... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by SlimFastForYou ( 578183 ) <konsoleman@@@yahoo...com> on Wednesday July 16, 2003 @03:40PM (#6455326) Journal
    for my cable Internet connection at home.

    Yes, I am dead serious... Lets just say Charter's cable Internet in my area lately really stinks. I would almost rather be on a 14.4k modem - no joke. I am not the only user... I get lag spikes of over 3000ms when not doing anything, and almost dropped connections. Good thing DSL recently became available in my area =D. One less Charter Pipeline subscriber.
  • They are developing the program which will replace web forums - you post a message to predetermined mail account and everybody subscribed will receive it very soon (patent pending).
    File transfers and weather forecasts are planned in 2006.
    This will make a difference.

  • RTFA (Score:5, Informative)

    by DrewMIT ( 98823 ) on Wednesday July 16, 2003 @03:42PM (#6455345)
    For those of you wondering why someone would do this, how about reading the damn article?

    The program doesn't e-mail back with a mere mirror of a google / yahoo results page. It actually filters through the individual results compressing the entire page. e.g. my search turns up a CNN page and a blurb on MSNBC and I get, e-mailed to me, compressed versions of those actual sites, not just links to them.

    As far the "my 28.8 modem is just fast enough" crowd -- read the article! Some of these locations the software is being developed for don't even have access to a phone line on a regular basis. And the lines they do have access to are more likely than not to be noisy as hell and not able to support a 28.8 connection.

    • Instead they are thinking of sending CDs to libraries so that people can borrow and install the software on their machines.

      I guess I should first mention the obvious that putting a bunch of other people's copyrighted work on a CD Rom, is the type of thing that gets people hauled before courts.

      As for compression, if you are using compression on the modem connection, then you don't really save any time by trying to compress the data again. You might save some space, but my experience is that a zip file

  • They are also considering trying to persuade computer sellers in developing countries to install the program on machines.

    They are going to develop countries to install the program on people's machines?

  • Still in use today in the US. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by _Sambo ( 153114 ) on Wednesday July 16, 2003 @03:42PM (#6455349)
    TODAY
    I am reminded of the Prepaid Legal system of doing business. You call up and ask a question, and the next day, an attorney familiar with the area you are asking about calls you back to answer your questions and advise you. So maybe this isn't all that outdated of an idea after

    IN REGARD TO THE SYSTEM IN THE ARTICLE:
    To have this capability back in 1973 would have been unbelievable. In 1983, to have this available to every library in the US would have been an unbelievable achievement. To have it now is so slow that I start to go google eyed even thinking about it.
    BUT
    This is great for countries that are 20-30 years behind in technology. It will revolutionize the search for information for areas that are not as connected as the US.

  • What it's really about (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 16, 2003 @03:42PM (#6455351)
    is not slow connections, but connections that are unreliable

    Using the phone in a country like Malawi can be a real adventure. It's not like the US at all.
  • So why is it that the answer to all of my searches is either "wet teens," "Generic Viagra," or "I am a banker from Nigeria?"

  • Also good to circumvent censorship (Score:5, Insightful)

    by pbox ( 146337 ) on Wednesday July 16, 2003 @03:42PM (#6455360) Homepage Journal
    Coincidentally (?) it is also very usefult to circumvent the Great Firewall. Way to go, but it would also be nice to optionally have the cached content (ala google) e-mailed as well. That would send the last standing wall crumbling.

  • and for those with no internet.... (Score:3, Funny)

    by vmxeo ( 173325 ) on Wednesday July 16, 2003 @03:45PM (#6455388) Homepage Journal
    And for those people with no internet connection, you can mail your search requests to MIT (Please include self-addressed stamped envelope). MIT will then process your search request within 5 business days, and mail you back the results. You can then peruse the results and marvel at the wealth at information you'd be able to find... if only you had internet access.

  • Wouldn't be needed if... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by DeltaSigma ( 583342 ) on Wednesday July 16, 2003 @03:48PM (#6455424) Journal

    ...only webdesigners had not collaborated to turn the web into the graphics orgy it is today. I mean, have these kids coming out of graphics school even browsed the relevant w3c specifications?

    News Flash !

    • The internet is for information, not television!
    • Web sites can look pretty and function better without being a giant photoshop mural!
    • Creating a clean design that's easily searchable, retrievable, and most of all, usable is a work of art!
    • Try telling that to a manager. Just try it. Or, if you wish, I can tell you what the response will be - in the absolute best case scenario, perfect world utopia, you will get a blank stare. From there it is all downhill.

      Notice that a *lot* of sites out there that are made by professionals for themselves or for open projects follow your guidelines. It is the commercial sites that don't (and the kiddie sites, of course, where you can't see the site for all the flash animations and counters).

      Sad thing is tha

      • Try telling that to a manager. Just try it. Or, if you wish, I can tell you what the response will be - in the absolute best case scenario, perfect world utopia, you will get a blank stare. From there it is all downhill.

        Exactly. When I was doing web design, for one customer I designed a beautiful, XHTML Strict site with incredibly low bandwidth requirements. The customer didn't think it was "snazzy" enough, and eventually had a graphic designer do a page design that was so agonizingly slow that I can't

    • Says who?

      And WTF is the point of all this computing power if its just to display boring text? For the love of GAWD even BOOKS have pictures!

      BOOKS!
    • The internet is for information, not television!

      Why shouldn't the internet (by which, I assume, you mean specifically the World Wide Web) be for both information AND television?

      Just because the markup language we call "HTML" was originally developed and is best suited for information-rich text documents such as academic papers a decade ago doesn't mean that we must not, or even should not, look beyond that type of content and find new uses for the system.

  • CSLIP already compresses it, most modems made since 1994 compress data, compressing it again at the application level won't help. Nevermind that the mail program will uuencode the data anyway & severely bloat it.
    • compressing it again at the application level won't help

      Yes, it will, especially if it's application-specific compression. CSLIP compression isn't particulary good (for good reason, it's supposed to be simple and efficient).

      Good point on uuencode, though. A compression program designed to produce 7-bit rather than 8-bit output to avoid this might be a win.
  • That's what it sounds like to me.

    • Re:uhhh...archie? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by EChris ( 24069 )
      Yeah I thought the same thing, though this goes a step further and sends compressed copies of the resulting pages back you, not just an index of the sites.

      What I wonder is why the *client* needs any software? Why not just make an email addy that people send queries to (like you did with "archie") and get the results back in whatever mailer you've got already?

      Chris

  • Free emulator (Score:3, Funny)

    by gspr ( 602968 ) on Wednesday July 16, 2003 @03:50PM (#6455443)
    For those of you who want to try it out at home, just use one of your several hundred AOL CDs, and voila, you'll have a line slow enough to try it out.

  • Google Voice Search (Score:5, Interesting)

    by GillBates0 ( 664202 ) on Wednesday July 16, 2003 @03:51PM (#6455453) Homepage Journal
    Check out the Google Voice Search [google.com] page. This has been up for quite a while now, and though not directly applicable as is, to people with a slow internet connection, it's just another alternative to emails. They should design it to respond by phone though. But again, people with dialup connections would, more often than not, not have a second phone line to request searches by phone.

    To try out this demo, please follow these simple steps:

    1. Pick up the phone and call the automated voice search system at (650) 318-0165.
    2. After the prompt Say your Search Keywords, say your query to the system.
    3. Click this link and a new window will open with your voice search results.
    4. Say another query, and the new window with the search results will be updated with the new results.

  • Other needs (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ferreth ( 182847 ) on Wednesday July 16, 2003 @03:55PM (#6455493) Homepage Journal

    First, for those of you saying 'Google is fast enough even on a 14.4K' - think school with one phone line, perhaps not even available during the day. Or how about connections via satelite phone at $$/min? Suddenly you want super efficient, when you only earn 5 bucks a day.

    As to what else this needs, the search engine needs to strip out all the crap before emailing a web page to you (Java, Flash, etc) - should focus on mostly text, small pictures only. Particulary since 486's would be a common platform for people using this, so the search engine better work well on one. You also should be able to strip out all pictures as an option to maximise text info download - remember turning off pictures in Netscape 2.x to speed up your browsing? If you need something it striped out, you should be able to query just for the bits you need later.

    Also the ability to share your cache between computers would be huge if they can't have a server to do that for them. At any rate, means of transferring those precious pages you downloaded to another computer - on a floppy, unless you have local email.

    • As someone whose school only had a 1.5kbps link to the internet, I consider myself qualified to comment on this subject.

      The ability to not download text only already exists. We used lynx to look at pages and downloaded images only when we thought they were relevant - and killed the download as soon as we saw enough to either understand the picture or realize it was not what we wanted to see.

      Also the ability to share your cache between computers would be huge if they can't have a server to do that for the

    • Re:Other needs (Score:4, Insightful)

      by kwerle ( 39371 ) <kurt@CircleW.org> on Wednesday July 16, 2003 @04:33PM (#6455804) Homepage Journal
      First, for those of you saying 'Google is fast enough even on a 14.4K' - think school with one phone line, perhaps not even available during the day. Or how about connections via satelite phone at $$/min? Suddenly you want super efficient, when you only earn 5 bucks a day.

      No, google is fast enough at 300Baud. Damn, but folks are young around here.

      As to what else this needs, the search engine needs to strip out all the crap before emailing a web page to you (Java, Flash, etc) - should focus on mostly text, small pictures only.

      Either configure your browser or proxy to do that. Easy.

      Particulary since 486's would be a common platform for people using this, so the search engine better work well on one.

      Give me a break. 486's are plenty powerful enough for web browsing. Even with pictures.

      You also should be able to strip out all pictures as an option to maximise text info download - remember turning off pictures in Netscape 2.x to speed up your browsing? If you need something it striped out, you should be able to query just for the bits you need later.

      [sarcasm on] Really? [/sarcasm]

      Also the ability to share your cache between computers would be huge if they can't have a server to do that for them. At any rate, means of transferring those precious pages you downloaded to another computer - on a floppy, unless you have local email

      Give me a frickin' break. PPP over null modem serial.

      This has got to be one of the worst ideas I've ever heard of. Hell, I knew of WWW via UUCP (that's email, kids) in the 90's - and that didn't require ANY "special search software."
  • Google responses are so slow that you have to email them -- but then clicking on the links in the email ISN'T to slow? Pretty half-fast solution, isn't it?
  • Back in 1998 I used to use Juno for email and had no web access. There was a free service that you could use to get web pages via email that I often used to "surf the web". the way it worked was you would send an email to webmail@curia.ucc.ie (I dont think it works now) and put "GO http://websiteaddress.com" in the body and it would email you back the html of that page.

    You could search yahoo by requesting a url like http://search.yahoo.com/bin/search?p=search+terms

    • Re:already been done(kind of) (Score:4, Informative)

      by BillThies ( 690098 ) on Thursday July 17, 2003 @12:21AM (#6458689)

      You're right that retrieving web pages over email has already been done. A present-day service that works as you describe is www4mail [www4mail.org], and I know people that use it regularly from low-connectivity regions.

      However, the TEK system (which I'm involved in) offers several benefits over a purely email-based solution. By having a web proxy on the client side, users can use their favorite browser to view downloaded pages, complete with color and formatting, which is often absent in text-only systems. Moreover, the client keeps a local, searchable cache of all downloaded pages, and the server keeps track of which pages have been sent to avoid wasting bandwidth on duplicate content. Finally, with a web-like user interface, many users can share a single e-mail account in a public kiosk or school.

      Many more details about the TEK system are available from the TEK Homepage [sourceforge.net]

  • I liked this technology when it came the first time around. Archie via email? Anyone? Yay! MIT reinvented Archie! Only with a thick client instead of a small one! Way to go!

    So what if it scans webpages instead of FTP sites. It's not that big of a leap.

  • Why not go all the way? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Pac ( 9516 ) <paulo...candido@@@gmail...com> on Wednesday July 16, 2003 @04:04PM (#6455561)
    They should develop a program that strips images, animation, java aplets, ActiveX components and all HTML from Web pages, leaving only the text and the links. Then send it to the users. It could be called Gopher. Or Archie.
  • Being that I am now stuck on a 56K Modem... this really wouldn't be bad IF I could pick software to have mailed to me. If I was able to get the new Open Office, Mozilla and Redhat updates for a low fee it might be helpful.

    Having webpages mailed to me seems stupid because I have high-speed internet at work and if there is a bandwith intensive site I just load it at work the next day...

  • This just in... (Score:3, Funny)

    by McD ( 209994 ) on Wednesday July 16, 2003 @04:14PM (#6455638)

    "MIT Reinvents Archie service from the early 90's."

  • This doesn't make any sense to me. I'm on 28.8, and 20 results from Google still come up instantly. Bandwidth might be an issue for the linked pages, but certainly not the search results. Even when I was on 14.4, back when Yahoo! was the hot search engine, it was no problem.

    So, what if these guys are on 300 baud and they get compressed search results via... e-mail??? The delay waiting for results to navigate e-mail systems probably negates the savings from the compression. Why not send compressed res

  • Good idea but... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Realistic_Dragon ( 655151 ) on Wednesday July 16, 2003 @04:18PM (#6455668) Homepage
    It's a shame that with the way the net is going all they will get as search results will be flash heavy sites that take 20 minutes to download on broadband, let along dial up.

    Where did all the sites go that you could use wget -r to grab overnight? How about the odd few that used to offer a .tar.gz for download and offline reading.

    Content over presentation is a concept that needs to be reintroduced to the net, preferably with a stick.

  • Prior Art ;-) (Score:2, Informative)

    by sICE ( 92132 )
    I wonder in what it is different from AGORA [google.com], Web-To-Email [google.com], Gopher [google.com], and such services services? If you dont know bout them, you might want to check the Accessing The Internet By E-mail -- Guide to Offline Internet Access [google.com] and Fravia's "How to search the web [searchlores.org]" lesson 10 [anticrack.de].

    Have fun.
  • One hardly needs a search engine to find a slower net. My first ISP, Concentric, certainly had a slower net. They are either gone now or hiding behind a different name, but you can still get a slower net from some providers. AOL users seem amazed when they see other systems using the same modems.
  • Maybe it should have an option to charge a few bucks and airmail you a CD-ROM's worth of the most relevent results....?
  • Though this idea has some merit, I don't know how useful it'd really be.

    For me, I usually go through several revisions of my Google (or other) searches before I either hit on what I'm looking for or realize that it's not out there.

    If I had to wait a day for each search query to come back, it'd take me a few weeks to do what I can accomplish in 10 minutes. Yeah, I know it's better than nothing, but "fine tuning" your query is a big part of what makes a search useful.

  • I mean... it seems like you could whip this out in a 10-20k program (tops).

  • The Internet Oracle [indiana.edu] always provides the best answer(s) to your questions.

  • Internet by mail (Score:3, Informative)

    by Smartcowboy ( 679871 ) on Wednesday July 16, 2003 @05:06PM (#6456083)
    This FAQ [faqs.org] explains how to access most of the internet using only a standard email client.

    The above document explain how to access:

    FTP
    ARCHIE (deprecated)
    FTPSEARCH (deprecated)
    GOPHER (deprecated)
    VERONICA (deprecated)
    JUGHEAD (deprecated)
    USENET
    WWW
    WWW SEARCH (using standard search engine like altavista, yahoo or google)
    FINGER
    WHOIS
    [...]

    All these protocols can be accessed via email, according to the FAQ. The FAQ has been around for a long time. This explains why many (most) involved protocols are now deprecated. I used this faq in the early '90 and I don't know how it works now. At the time, it was great. The last update is 2002/04/16.
  • Why do they need a program for this? Of course, it automatically unpacks stuff from the email, etc, but that's not something that you absolutely need.

    I mean, there are already http-over-email services, that do not need any special program, you just send a mail to the service's address with the links to the stuff you want and it sends it back and you could use it perfectly this way: just send a mail with a line like 'hedgehog asia' to mail@search.com and it would send you back a reply with all the pages re

  • Where's the money? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by PapaZit ( 33585 ) on Wednesday July 16, 2003 @05:15PM (#6456180)
    As admirable as the idea behind this project is, I don't think it'll succeed. In a word: money. The programming and research aren't the problem -- someone's getting a thesis out of this, so MIT'll foot the bill. The problem comes with finding money for maintaining and improving the servers, handling abuse, support, etc.

    It's a service that's only useful for poor third-world schools. Those organizations are probably running on a donated 486. They sure don't have money to pay, or even the money to pay to download ads. Charity-wise, "fund a search engine for poor third-worlders" is somewhat less compelling than "feed a starving child".

    I see this idea living on research and enthusiasm for a year or two then dying a quiet, broke death.
  • No. Seriously.

    There are a Lot Of Sites which the lords of Google have cut from their search engine. And I'm not talking porn. (The proliferation of sex-obsession is actually encouraged due to its weakening effect upon individuals.) I'm talking about anything which holds any real weight and thereby pisses off the wrong people. --Or anybody who needs to be punished, are chopped from what has become the Internet's de-facto public eye. (Google.)

    Easily done, too. Make a remarkable product. (Google was a

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