…writ large. Now this is cool. Grub is an attempt to use the world’s collective computing power to build a great search engine. It’s free to download and play around with (though you do have to register) and the potential payoff is there, imagine a search engine even better than Google.

For those of you unfamiliar with distributed computing, the idea is you use the cpu’s of machines that would otherwise be idle (like your office computer when you are home, or your home machines when you are at work) to perform computational operations. In the past I’ve noted projects like the iterations over common cold bacteria and the like; this is the first one likely to produce results I would use. Well, unless the SETI people find an alien culture or two 😉