ITinfo: Is P2P The Future?

Peer-To-Peering

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Is P2P The Future?

by Dave Murphy
ISSN 1535-3613

Napster has been around for quite a while, and it's set the standard for peer-to-peer (P2P) file swapping programs. It's changed the way digital music is distributed, and the next generation of P2P apps may just change the way we search the Internet and our corporate intranets.

The same P2P software that let's Internet users swap MP3 music files is the foundation of a few new search engines (SE) that are just now coming on the scene. The new SEs use a Napster-like network of computers but they keep track of more than MP3 files. They'll track anything on your hard drive that you register with the SE.

Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen described one such engine, Pointera, as "changing the Internet in a way that it hasn't changed since the browser."

Pointera lets users search for information using a standard web browser. And Spinfrenzybeing, Pointera's parent, isn't betting on making a lot of money on the school-age set, it's focusing on developing SE applications for the business market.

Other P2P engines are also around the corner: one, Gonesilent, is from the developers of the file swapping software Gnutella, and it lists stock quotes, shows photos, and even solves math problems. Napster can't do that!

Another Gnutella-family SE is called gPulp. It can be used to search anything.

Peer-to-peer search doesn't need to find, retrieve, categorize, and package. It finds what's on another hard drive at the moment the search goes out. And this is both good and bad.

Because P2P SEs index current files, it's easy to spam the search engines. The major online SEs, AltaVista, Google, and their peers, pick up most engine spammers and discard their submissions. But P2P SEs don't have any filtering capability as of yet. I'll bet it will follow, but in the short run, beware that P2P searches may be filled with lots of links to adult-related material and get-rich-quick schemes.

Speaking of the seedy side of the net, the New Year's weekend was a pleasant respite from the hundreds of spam messages I receive each day. I only received a handful of UCE over the entire weekend. I reset my computer last night with happy thoughts and high hopes for a new world without spammers. Then I opened my email this morning to see more than four dozen junk mail messages waiting to be deleted.

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