Every Wednesday on AltSearchEngines, we visit the CEO of one of our Alternative search engines.  Since last night’s debate featured FAROO (and Atlas), we headed over there for a chat with CEO Malgorzata Garbe.

Editor’s note:  I have visited many CEOs since we began AltSearchEngines on June 1st, but Malgorzata sounds like she could have written our mission statement for me!

Yesterday in the Great Debate: Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Search, we had the opportunity to give you some insight about FAROO. And there will be a second part, which you should not miss .  But today I would like to talk about something different than our architecture, ranking or revenue sharing.

When we presented FAROO two weeks ago at the TechCrunch40 conference in San
Francisco, we got a huge amount of response.  Most people we were talking to found it a really great idea to connect people all over the world in order to build a search engine without all those servers, but instead benefiting from the “wisdom of crowds” of it users.

But then, there were also some scepticism.  Why would a small start up like FAROO choose a market, which seemingly is already taken by big players?  And can a distributed search engine like FAROO convince a following large enough to succeed?

I’m almost certain that many of our fellow “alternative search engines” are also confronted with these kinds of questions:  Why do users need another search engine, and how do you dare compete with the R&D department of multi-billion dollar companies?

Well, from today’s view, it is obvious that there is place for instant messaging besides email, for blogs besides homepages, for Firefox besides Internet Explorer and for Wikipedia besides Encyclopaedia Britannica.  But at the time when these ideas were born, it took foresighted founders, believing and fighting for their ideas.

And, I believe neither improvements are a matter of money, nor inventions a matter of headcount.  There is a very interesting article from Anna Patterson of Stanford
University: “Why Writing Your Own Search Engine is Hard.”  I really recommend it to everybody involved with search engine development.  She writes: “It has never been done by a big group; always one to four people did the core work, and the big team came on to build the elaborations and the production infrastructure.”

I fully agree with this statement, and this is also our chance as alternative search engines.
We are small teams, but we are flexible and free to think into directions, where others believe they are not feasible, not in-line with a general company strategy, or where there is just no time, no money, nor people available to think about it right now.

We take our risk, and it might be risky to spend months or even years, to follow an idea which hasn’t been proven before, and many experts are skeptic about it.  And, we are free to admit, we are free to meander on our way. It’s like an expedition, where you know the destination, but there are no maps with the right way through the unknown territory you have to cross.

But at the same time it’s our only chance to discover new ways. Because one thing  is for sure, just following the carved trail of the majors, it will be impossible to catch them, and we will find nothing than some lost crumbs.

So there are some reasons to start a new search engine.  And of course it’s great to see, how an idea turns into reality and that the users start to share our vision of a better search.

The Great Debate with FAROO and Atlas will conclude this coming Tuesday night!