To address a couple of the points you raise: truly distributed indexing and P2P retrieval is actually something we tossed around as a potential approach ourselves..

There are a few reasons that we haven’t gone down that route. Firstly, as you rightly point out, it’s not a trivial problem to solve, and one we’d prefer to tackle once we have a more basic service available and working. Secondly, it would be a much more heavyweight install for our users compared to a small Firefox extension. Thirdly, we have some pretty exciting features in the pipeline to do with social browsing, intelligent categorisation and sharing – all things which really require a more centralised architecture.

Also, you raise the possibility of an ‘open alternative’. Once this initial surge of users has become slightly less intense, we full plan to stablise, formalise our APIs to expose communal data, perhaps even opt-in individual data too. Obviously, if we go down the route of fatter client agents for P2P, it absolutely makes sense to make the APIs public in that case too.

Thanks again from the WebMynd team!