Ever since Google appeared on the search scene other players have slowly diminished in importance and with good reason. Despite naysayers, Google continues to have all the features that made it the favorite, viz: speed, relevance, large index, open APIs and more.

So does that mean that there are no innovations on the search front? Well, start-ups such as Majestic, Faroo and YaCy are all set to introduce peer to peer (P2P) technology based search. A P2P based search will shift the power away from large search companies to the user. No longer is the search and indexing capability limited to the number of servers that your search engine has, a P2P search tool can leverage all the interconnected computers on the Internet running the software.

All you need is to download and install a P2P search tool like the ones listed above and you are set. Such tools typically crawl the web and index it locally. The search index is shared with other “peers” (with full security and privacy). So a search is made against the shared indexes across hundreds of computers. This technology seems to hold a lot of promise and will scale as content on the Internet grows.