Featured link: www.hoowot.com

No one could have predicted a few years ago that Google, Amazon and eBay would all become household names. Could Plumstead student Roger Stachis's Hoowot site be the next big thing?,/p>

HOOWOT'S aim is simple to turn the traditional search engine concept on its head. It intends to do this by providing a truly interactive global billboard which allows users from all over the world to add entries about pretty much anything.

Visitors to the site can then search the Hoowot database to find entries which match whatever information they are looking for.

This differs from regular search engines in that Hoowot does not crawl the web for information. All the data is provided by its users.

The site works on the principle someone somewhere has what you want or wants what you have.

Student Roger Stachis, from Plumstead, dreamt up the idea for Hoowot while he completed a computer science degree.

"I got the idea for the site while I was researching an obscure topic as part of my uni work," he said.

"I was thinking to myself someone somewhere must be doing similar research' and that was the eureka moment.

"With the internet's global reach, finding that someone somewhere is actually possible."

The look of the Hoowot site is very much no frills and the information contained in the search database is very limited at the moment but the concept definitely has potential.

The internet was intended for this very use the global sharing of information and Hoowot is a real return to basics, while at the same time attempting to reinvent one of the internet's biggest successes, the search engine.

Time will tell whether a Plumstead student's brainchild grows up to be one of the big players on the world wide web.