Wikipedia talk:Articles for deletion/FAROO

Wolf Garbe here, developer of the Faroo Peer-to-peer web search engine https://github.com/wolfgarbe/ https://medium.com/@wolfgarbe/ https://www.quora.com/profile/Wolf-Garbe/answers

Faroo existed from 2004 till 2014, and was with 3 million peers the largest peer-to-peer web search engine which ever existed, and the only one with usable results and good latency.

In February 2001 the idea of a peer-to-peer search engine was published [1], in 2004 Faroo prototype was developed and released in 2005 [2].

In 2007 Faroo was nominated as finalist in the Techcrunch40 Technology conference [3].

In 2008 Faroo received a series A Funding by Sir Li_Ka-shing, a Hong Kong business magnate, investor, and philanthropist.

In 2013 and 2015 two patents [4,5] for Faroo's p2p technology were awarded by the USPTO.

There are many mentions on the web and citations in academic papers, e.g.
 * https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Faroo
 * https://thenextweb.com/2010/01/20/degrees-distribution-search/
 * https://readwrite.com/2009/12/05/technical-qa-with-faroo-founder/
 * [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_search_engine#FAROO
 * [3] https://techcrunch.com/2007/09/17/techcrunch-40-session-1-search-discovery/
 * [4] Publication number US8359318 B2 https://patents.google.com/patent/US8359318 Publication date 22 Jan 2013, Filing date 13 Oct 2009, Priority date 13 Oct 2008
 * [5] Publication number US8938459 B2 https://patents.google.com/patent/US8938459 Publication date 20. Jan. 2015, Filing date 18 Jan 2013, Priority date 13 Oct 2008
 * https://www.zeit.de/zeit-wissen/2012/05/Das-alternative-Netz/seite-2 [German] — Preceding unsigned comment added by Zenflow (talk • contribs) 00:44, 22 January 2021 (UTC)
 * [1] Garbe, W. BINGOOO — Die Transformation des World Wide Web zur virtuellen Datenbank. Wirtschaftsinf 43, 511–515 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03250815 — Preceding unsigned comment added by Zenflow (talk • contribs) 00:52, 22 January 2021 (UTC)
 * M. Herrmann, R. Zhang, K. Ning, C. Diaz and B. Preneel, "Censorship-resistant and privacy-preserving distributed web search," 14-th IEEE International Conference on Peer-to-Peer Computing, London, 2014, pp. 1-10, doi: 10.1109/P2P.2014.6934312.
 * Ichrak Saif, Abdelaziz Sdigui Doukkali, Adil Enaanai, and El Habib Benlahmar. 2017. Genaum: new semantic distributed search engine. J. Mob. Multimed. 13, 34 (December 2017), 210221.
 * Ahmed, Reaz & Bari, Md. Faizul & Haque, Rakibul & Boutaba, R. & Mathieu, Bertrand. (2015). DEWS: A decentralized engine for Web search. Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Network and Service Management, CNSM 2014. 254-259. 10.1109/CNSM.2014.7014168.
 * [6] https://onezero.medium.com/why-decentralization-matters-5e3f79f7638e
 * Response to [6] https://wolfgarbe.medium.com/i-love-the-idea-of-distribution-and-the-rediscovery-of-the-founding-principle-of-the-internet-and-91ec5ffbb5c3

I think for technology history and educational reason about what can be achieved with decentralization it deserves a mention. Also it might be valuable information for those who are trying the same today [6] or in the years to come.

All the information about Faroo's p2p search is still true and valuable, even if Faroo itself doesn't exist anymore, like Blekko, Powerset, Cuil and other search engines which are defunct today, but still worth remembering and having information about.

Today, when online monopolies of gatekeepers like Google and Facebook are increasingly questioned, it would be sad to remove the history of attempts to decentralize search. Given that a Wikipedia entry costs nothing, I can't see a good reason for deleting history.

Might the gods of Wikipedia and their deputies on earth decide whatever they please.

FYI here are some general thoughts on decentralized p2p vs. centralized technology: https://www.quora.com/What-problem-does-peer-to-peer-networking-solve/answer/Wolf-Garbe