The Next Web

Faroo: P2P Web Search

By Boris
April 21, 2008
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Faroo.com CEO Gosia Garbe

The first company I met today was Faroo. They are from Germany and Gosia Garbe, the CEO, gave me a quick update on their progress.

Garbe started development on Faroo more than 6 years ago and launched during Techcrunch40 here in San Francisco about a year ago. They are based in Germany. It is a P2P search engine that users install on their PCs, is free to use, as quick as Google and even can earn you some money as revenue is shared with users.

Garbe told me she was slightly disappointed with user adoption (actual downloads) since they launched.
Unfortunately the application only works on PCs and isn’t supported on Mac and Linux and there is no way to test the actual search engine without installing the application first. I can imagine that this requires too big a leap of faith for most users.

The idea of P2P search is interesting though. Google reportedly spends 2 billion a year on their server infrastructure. If a search engine would be able to move all that data to the end user thereby speeding up the service and saving huge amounts of money that would give them a huge edge.

The question is how to entice these users to start contributing to a product that won’t prove its benefit until you start contributing. A chicken and egg problem that Faroo is eager to solve.

[reported live from the AltSearchEngines event]


  • Wes
    I have been using the search engine and it is okay. Google is definitely better at the moment. Before Google was saying "do no evil" company however now they have succumbed to the "corporate bottom line" problem. Ethics go out the window in a corporate environment. If they are willing to assist in the Chinese government censor their people than they are willing to do the same to us. If they aren't doing it already.
  • Simone Brummelhuis
    Boris, great that you 'stumbled upon' a 'female internet hero', CEO Gosia Garbe!!
  • anon
    So you post video’s on a video sharing website? Only about a million people in the world understand that most video sharing websites don’t show fullscreen videos and only video’s of about 10 minutes length. These are the people who actually look at any technology/product/service minutely under the lens. Mermaid is for them. Mermaid is a suite of Global Broadcast products. They are based on absolutly serverless P2P technology. Which means absolutly no central monitoring or control. No Censorship=> Free Speech. This is the world of tomorrow. Where everyone is directly connected to everyone else without using any servers. Server based technology cannot scale to even 1/10th of global population’s usage. Thats the catch. People who understand these limitations and that Mermaid products can be used on a corporate lan as easily as on the internet without any modification or configuration changes. Now organisations can conduct online meetings worldwide or on their network with all their 1,00,000 employees spread throughout the world. News is pushed onto every computer on the planet, on your private network within seconds of being published…

    Welcome to the revolution and its free for everyone and its called MetaASO Mermaid http://mermaid.metaaso.com
  • dave rigby
    Web-based P2P is already possible using FilesWIre.com. You can share millions of files WITHOUT having to download a client. So my question is why would anyone use faroo?
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