Finding the needle in the haystack [search engines]

A new search technology could make peer-to-peer networks easier to use and help them become a legitimate online distribution channel. The decentralized designs common to public peer-to-peer networks make them resistant to legal or technological disruption, but they also create a weakness: it´s hard to find anything but the most popular material, usually illegal music or barely legal pornography. Now, Los Angeles-based Streamcast Networks Inc. hopes to fix that weakness and to improve peer-to-peer´s image into the bargain with a new search technology known as NEOnet. NEOnet is integrated into Streamcast´s signature peer-to-peer software, Morpheus. NEOnet is so important to Streamcast´s strategy. It seeks, through NEOnet´s improved ability, to find files other than musing or the pinup du jour, to get users to accept Streamcast´s peer-to-peer network as a reliable place to find legitimate information, entertainment or software, much as the Web is used today. But NEOnet also offers the advantage that a peer-to-peer network can help share the load currently associated with hosting such content on the Web.