Searching Internet Offline!!

Well, it sure caught me offguard when I read about it, I thought surely that’s crazy, searching internet while not connected to internet, unless its an offline cache which the user will be searching. And it does seem thats the case, what with Rakesh Mathur of Junglee.com(which was later bought by Amazon) fame & a few others forming a startup in Silicon Valley called Webaroo, which will supposedly allow users of laptops & other mobile computers search internet while not actually connected to it.

The service labelled as innovative by Mathur is nothing but delving deeper into caching data offline & searching it for information. There will be search “packs” available for different categories in sports, cities etc. weighing in at around 200MB or above each which will contain compressed results for that particular category as crawled by Webaroo and prioritized by its algorithm. So when the device will be connected to internet, the software will update the installed packs & remove the redundant entries from it.

However exciting this service can be, I really do have my reservations about it. Really, what exactly will it be serving? A search result is useless without the ability to look at the contents of the links listed on it. So is this service also gonna cache the content of the websites? And who will be using it? Mathur can say that it’ll be a boon for people carrying laptops etc. in airplanes but unable to access internet, but I’ll have to say that he’s either a tad bit late or he hasn’t been keeping up with times, major airlines are tying up with telecom providers and it won’t be long before internet access will be common while in a flight. Other than that, it surely means keeping a lot of “packs”, unless you are a user who searches on just a handful of topics!!

Call me sceptical but I also fail to see where the innovation is in this service!! Caching is not new nor is searching it, a feature for making pages available for offline browsing has been present for years in Internet Explorer & other browsers. So this service is just as innovative as is a search engine frontend that instead of traditional form post uses AJAX to submit the query to server & fetch and display results!! :eyebrow: Just wait and watch, the Indian media is gonna go ‘ga ga’ over this as well just like they went over Sabeer Bhatia’s BlogEverywhere!! :sick: This story is already on the website of HindustanTimes, I would be hardly surprised if it makes it to the print edition today & in other newspapers in the next few days(if not today).