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> What is Net2map ?

Net2map is a multidimensional peer to peer search engine project. It is an open source (GPL licensed) project, and you may download it for free on the download page. Sourcecode is available at SourceForge.

Technical documentation (generated with Doxygen ) is available here.

Remark 1 : Net2map is under construction. It still has some bugs, and we are working hard to correct them.

Net2map may start very slowly on some Windows XP computers.
Net2map's user interface may not display correctly on MacOS.
Web indexing uses lots of memory.
Jxta connections may be slow.

Remark 2 : Two discussion lists are available:

Liste	Description	Inscription	Envoi de message
News	Get an e-mail notification each time net2map is updated.	Subscribe	news.en@net2map.org
Discuss	Open discussion with other net2map users	Subscribe	discuss.en@net2map.org

Multidimensional search

You may use up to three differents search criterias at once. Net2map displays search results on a "map of the net". Each result appears as a small button on the map. These buttons are positionned according to their criteria values: For example, if you choose a date interval for the X axis, the oldest results will be near the left edge of the map.

Many dimensions may be used (Page popularity , Last modification date...) New dimension may be created and added to the system.

This system has two advantages :

You may use several search criterias at once. For example, imagine you are looking for gimp, but you have forgotten it's name. With a traditional search engine, you will probably type "free photo editing software" and end up with a million of non-pertinent results! If yo run the same search on a multidimensional search engine, you may use the "top level domain" search criteria to separate results coming from ".com" from results coming from ".org" sites. This is just a very simple example. Multidimensional search has many other uses, some of them we haven't thought of... On a discussion list, multidimensional search may become an interesting alternative to moderators: Using an "Author" search criteria, all messages coming from the same person will appear lined up. If someone "floods" the list with tons of messages, you will just get a long line of results, clearly separated from other user's messages. Don't of let something (a PageRank algorithm) or someone (a moderator) decide what is relevant for you, just use your eyes!

You may use search criterias which are unavailable on traditional search engines: Geogaphical origin (using GeoIP ), User rating, etc...

Important : For the time being, only the Keyword, Creation Date and Document Size are available. Other dimensions are under construction.

Ressources sharing (peer-to-peer)

Net2map uses Jxta to share search results. Each Net2map peer may index a part of the web, and reply to search queries coming from other nodes.

When You make a search, you get results coming from your own peer, and results coming from other peers.

Distributed indexing and searching has obvious advantages:

Google needs 3 months to update it's 3 billion pages index. It's search results are often outdated. Using a distributed indexer, you may have your site reindexed each time you publish something on it, simply because you are the one running the indexer! Imagine that: you advertise an event that is happening next week, and get feedback within a few hours...

You don't need an array of supercomputers to run Net2map. The more we are, the more powerful it gets:

>Legalese

Net2map is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Lesser General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 675 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.

Copyright (C) 2003 Philippe Moulin - Alain Menesguen