Why create another search engine? There's already so many.

Well the problem with all of the existing search engines is all they do is some form of keyword searches. We hope to make Sprawler the world's first "smart" search engine, meaning that it not only searched for words but what you meant by those words. Many search engine users know the bother of scrolling through hundreds of results without any finding anything related to their search. We, the developers of Sprawler hope to alleviate that pain. Now, how we plan on actually implement our ideas is yet to be disclosed. We want to make sure that none of them are stolen by big companies who try to sue us for the rights to our own intellectual property.

I can understand programmers, but why do you need a patent lawyer?

In a word, insurance. We want to make sure we can keep this project open source, while at the same time making sure that a company doesn't try to come in and take our ideas and claim them as their own, then sue us for stealing their ideas or code.

If this is free software, and no one gets paid, why do you need donations?

A few reasons:

• We plan to expand sprawler.com and have it use the full-blown sprawler program. This will require high amounts of bandwidth (which isn't free) and possibly a new server (also not free)
• If we need to apply for any US pattents, even if the lawyer is willing to give us his services for free, the US patent office still charges a fee for processing patents.
• We want to be able to pay for all of the above without having to raise money from putting ads on our sites.

So what's the difference between the search engine on www.sprawler.com and the one on beta.sprawler.com?

The beta.sprawler.com one is an improved version of the one on www.sprawler.com, and is MUCH faster, returns better results, more scalable, more modular, etc. It is the "next step" in the move towards the full version. For a more detailed description, check the Release Info, or join the Sprawler development team and help us create the answer.

This FAQ didn't answer my question. Who/What/When/Where/Why/How ...?

Good question. You can find Developers' contact information at the About Us page or at the Sourceforge Project Page.