A SEARCH ENGINE THAT LEARNS
A new search engine by OpenCola Ltd. is designed to cut through the
information glut of peer-to-peer networking. The product, called
Folders--P2P, is collaborative search software that adapts to users'
preferences and provides increasingly relevant content in response to
search requests. Folders will be available for public beta testing in late
April, and will first be directed at communities of software developers.
Users put files of interest -- say, an article about security holes in
routers -- into a folder on their desktop. Folders crawls the network,
migrating to the desktops of anyone likely to have the router information.
The software finds other files held by those with similar interests and
suggests those as well. When a user nixes a suggestion like that, Folder
retains the user's preferences for information sources and will change
subsequent searches accordingly. "With a network like this, the
collaborative intelligence of everyone who makes decisions about keeping
things or throwing them away will form a kind of human-distributed
editorship," says company founder Cory Doctorow. (InformationWeek 11 Jan 2002)
http://www.informationweek.com/story/IWK20020111S0001


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