Vía Smart Mobs, llego a un muy interesante concepto: utilizar el poder distribuido de los ordenadores del mundo mundial para conformar una nueva manera de búsqueda, ¿alternativa a Google? Supongo que es ciencia ficción, pero atrae, ¿no? Majestic-12 utiliza ideas que enlazan claramente con principios del entorno Web 2.0.
Detrás del proyecto está un ruso afincado en Birmingham, según leo en esta noticia del Guardian: If distributed processing can search for aliens, why not web pages? Pues tiene su lógica, desde luego. Chudnovsky, though, wants to use the technique that has worked so well – at least for recruitment – for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (Seti), cancer searches, climate change modelling and, most recently, cracking a set of encrypted messages sent from a submarine during the second world war. Distributed computing lets many participants do little bits of work to create a huge result, using spare time on their computers.
Parece, por tanto, que la idea es P2P radical: «Ideally, I’d like to distribute the search index,» says Chudnovsky. This is a challenging proposition that would see duplicate chunks of a huge index distributed between broadband-connected PCs. There are also parallels with peer-to-peer systems such as Gnutella, which share music, films and software. A small-scale experiment with one country, perhaps Finland, may happen later this year. Chudnovsky’s aspirations are more community-minded, helping to develop a search engine that users control. Nevertheless, his innovative code might revitalise searches on corporate websites or, more controversially, assist with search engine optimisation. But as video, images and music are added to burgeoning search engine indices, crawling and search tasks will need to become more distributed.
Bueno, pues continúa la tendencia a lograr formas emergentes de búsqueda a partir de la agregación de la capacidad de los individuos (máquinas en este caso). Quizá sea otra evidencia del poder de las masas cuando existen tecnologías adecuadas (wisdom of crowds, again, me temo).
Technorati tags | p2p distributed computing