April 21, 2003 09:30 AM

Since posting Search: By the People, For the People a couple distributed search/crawling projects have come my way. Andrew Wooldridge pointed out WideSource, and Mihalis Panagiotakis mefied HyperBee.

WideSource is a free search "community." It hooks into your bookmarks allowing you to categorize them while it spiders those sites in the background. You can then search those sites, or the sites of other users. The search is peer to peer. It also has chat functionality and other community oriented features.

HyperBee is roughly the same concept as Grub, only it hasn't launched yet. It has a distributed crawler, but a centralized search.

Neither one of these hooks into my web trail. It looks like WideSource could be adapted to hook into the history of IE and Netscape and crawl those pages as well. We'll see what their thoughts are.

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