Sun buys P2P search engine, InfraSearch

SAN FRANCISCO: Sun Microsystems Inc. has bought search engine software

company InfraSearch Inc., which aims to use the peer-to-peer technology, made

famous by music swapping program Napster, to open up a "deep Web" of

information, the company said Tuesday.

Sun said it had acquired 100 per cent of the firm in a stock deal but

declined to give financial terms. It said Burlingame, Calif.-based InfraSearch

would be integrated into one of its research groups working on distributed, or

peer-to-peer computing.

Peer-to-peer programming, farms out and decentralizes computing resources by

referring a user with a question to a peer likely to have an answer rather than

relying on a centralized server computer to answer every question. That means

networks can be faster, since a central server does not have to work as hard,

and network users do not necessarily need to work through that central computer.

InfraSearch, which does not have a final product yet, keeps a list of topics

on which its partners are willing to provide information, much like the list of

songs posted on Napster. In a commercial version, a user would ask InfraSearch a

question and InfraSearch would connect the user with a web site it believed had

the answer. The Web site, which would have previously agreed to work with

InfraSearch, would then hand over its freshest data to the user.

Current search engines, on the other hand, try to answer questions based on

information they had previously culled from the Internet with "web

crawlers" searchers, which may have looked at a site an hour ago or a week

ago.

The peer-to-peer approach only works with users who have joined the group,

Sun vice president, Mike Clary said in a telephone interview after Sun announced

the deal. "All you are looking for is what are they willing to be searched

on," he said.

But cooperation potentially opens up a "deep Web" by allowing the

sites searched to offer up information in databases which are not necessarily

reflected on Web pages, an example which also shows the peer-to-peer model

requires cooperation, he said.

Clary said Sun's project juxtapose, the peer-to-peer research incubator,

would release it for developers as soon as April, its layer of

"plumbing" for peer-to-peer software, which would set the conventions

for network machines talking to each other. InfraSearch would run on top of that

layer, though he said there was no date set for release.

"In a sense all we are doing is setting up the ability to use the Yellow

Pages," he said.

(C) Reuters Limited 2001.