Saturday, July 16, 2005

About this Blog

In the same vein as many other developers who have started having publically available blogs to discuss the progress they are making, I've created this blog as a place for me to discuss the work I'm doing on peer-to-peer web search.

The idea for this project came from a paper written by Paul De Bra and Reinier Post on the Fish-search, which was a client side Web search engine. It had a lot of good ideas, but in my opinion they were about 10 years ahead of their time. The Web is quite a bit different today than it was then, which means there are different constraints and goals in attempting a client side search.

I plan to use this blog to detail the progress I'm making on my thesis and discuss some ideas I've had, both for my own benefit, and for anyone else who happens to be interested in this. It will probably have a lot of ramblings about various other peer-to-peer systems, different challenges I'm trying to overcome, interesting things I've read, and maybe announcements about other related projects that I find.

My thesis is primarily going to discuss how a distributed peer-to-peer web search engine could be accomplished, how it would deal with issues that peer-to-peer networks must deal with, and what would be the reason for doing it in the first place. I also hope to actually demonstrate this is possible with a program I've decided to call SearchActive.

SearchActive will be a practical implementation of the ideas I discuss in my thesis. The thesis will probably be relatively abstract, while SearchActive will let me get down into the guts of putting this thing together. It will also give me something to test the actual behavior of the system. I am hoping to have at least a proof of concept ready by around January that I will let some of my friends use to test things out. Hopefully I will be able to conduct a largers scale test and include the results in my thesis. Once all this is done, I'm planning to release the project as an open source project, and hopefully a few other developers will join me. In that case, I will invite other people to post on this blog too so we can have several viewpoints and aspects on the development of SearchActive. Of course that's looking a ways ahead, so don't hold me too any of that.

So to sum it all up, this blog will be a place to post information about the progress on SearchActive, as well as discuss some of the more theoretical foundations of the project.

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Well, you wrote this just about 2 years ago; it looks as though the swarm never really got off the ground - or did it?

I have fond memories of fish search, but it was always a toy. Client-based, live search will never work well.

But some interesting work was done because of it. let me know what you did yourself!

Reinier

1:15 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Whoops, I couldn't find your later postings for some reason, but I see them now, and you did make progress!

1:34 PM  

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