Web searching goes offline with Webaroo

A new company is planning on changing the way we search websites

10 April 2006 0:00 GMT / By Stuart Miles

A new company is planning on changing the way we search websites by allowing you to take the whole procedure offline.

Webaroo, a new start-up, is launching a new service that for the first time can be used to search the web and view websites when the device is not connected to the Internet

Available free from www.webaroo.com, the new search engine takes the most relevant parts of the web and makes it downloadable in bite-sized chunks. You can get Pocket-lint one level down for a minuscule 4MB for example.

To get users started the company plans to offer "web packs" on particular subjects, such as news, World Cup 2006, London and other major cities worldwide, each of which contains hundreds of thousands of relevant web pages on the topic, identified by Webaroo's unique algorithms.

In addition, users can identify favourite web sites they wish to download and search in one simple step. Whenever the device is reconnected to the web, all packs and sites are updated with the latest information automatically in the background.

The application, which is free, is currently available for PC or Windows Mobile 2003 devices although currently not Apple Mac, means that you can get a good chunk of the web on your hard drive without taking up a petabytes of space (that's 1,024 terabytes to you an me).

Those looking to capture the whole of the web will have to wait just a little longer though;

"We are hoping to release an option later this year where you will be able to store the whole of the web on a 40GB hard drive" Brad Husick, the search engines co-founder told Pocket-lint.

Full tags

Software, Online, Search engines, Webaroo