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Wowd – Real-Time Search Engine

November 4th, 2009 View Comments

I have been playing around with Wowd, a new real-time search engine for a week and unfortunately find it slightly frustrating. I first found out about this search engine whilst reading MIT Technology Review and I was looking forward to getting my hands on Wowd to see if lived up to its billing. Unfortunately, at the moment its a slightly disappointing product although the potential is clearly there.
Wowd is a social real-time search engine, basing its results on what people are actually searching for right now. The most popular searches appear on the homepage, but Wowd are trying to encourage you to download an application to your desktop which will track your browsing behaviour. Given current issues in the UK about privacy, mainly cuased by companies like Phorm, I can’t really see this application download taking off.
Two Quick fixes:

1) Firefox Extension – Stumble Upon is one of my favourites and I can see Wowd working in a similar way. It could be a really nice little tool, especially from an advertising perspective if we can see the data accumulated.

2) Visual demonstration of data – the homepage at the moment is a bit dull, not simple like Google’s. It could do with some sort of visual streaming and mapping of data.

Bill York

Because of the decentralized peer-to-peer architecture of Wowd, you actually have better control of your privacy when using the downloaded version than when you are using our web site (or any other search site for that matter). When you type a search into the local Wowd client it triggers communication with other nodes in the network that are managing bits of information that are relevant to your query. Those nodes respond with that data and your local client then does the intersection and ranking steps and presents the results in your local browser. Wowd as a company has no central servers or logging. We don't know who you are, we don't track you from site to site with cookies,we don't even know that someone at your IP address just did a search, let alone what you searched for. Because your data stays on your local computer we can offer features such as full web history search without requiring you to first share your full web browsing trace with us in order for us to give it back to you later.
- Bill York, VP of Engineering, Wowd

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