mediajunk

There has been some speculation among search engine enthusiasts that Longhorn – the name given to the forthcoming Microsoft search product – will offer peer-to-peer searching.

While Microsoft has made no comment to this effect, it has hinted that its new search technology will aim to rival Google’s, and will involve integration with its existing products. The company would be in an extremely advantageous position were it to enter the peer-to-peer (P2P) search market, since it already has such a vast share of the operating system market.

A P2P tool would use the physical internet, but it would not have to run on a browser. Thus a user of Microsoft Word may decide to do a search for a particular piece of information relevant to a topic he’s searching on – and, if he was linked to the internet, the search could through Word documents on the “public” portion of the hard drives of all other users that are connected to the internet.

Where would public drives come from? From any Microsoft users who wish to share their information (why they would do so is another question).
Let's say that I declare the partition "F:" of my hard drive as "public". In our futuristic peer-to-peer scenario, all of the contents of my F: drive would thus be searchable by all other Microsoft users connected to the internet. These other users could be looking around in my hard drive without my even knowing about it.

Of course, the logistical and privacy issues connected with this hypothetical scenario would be a nightmare.

Then again, thinking back to twelve years ago, if someone was to describe to me then how the world of digital information sharing (i.e. the web and its search engines) would be now, I would have said “impossible”.
And a couple of P2P search engines – Napster and Gnutella – have already proven notoriously popular, even though these have been restricted to certain kinds of (music) files.

Meantime, one company that’s trying to get ahead of the posse on P2P searching is Widesource. Check out their free P2P search engine.