Skyrider gets $8M to launch new sort of search engine: of peer-to-peer

Skyrider, a Mountain View start-up, is developing technology that will be able to search peer-to-peer traffic, in order to help media and other companies become more profitable.

The two-year old company has raised $8 million from Silicon Valley’s top VC firm Sequoia Capital, along with Charles River Ventures. The company’s product will be announced in fall, the company told us last night. (Here is their release.)

The company aims to “monetize” popular peer-to-peer networks, which have emerged to help circulate large files such as video. Since that’s where the information is, that’s where to do the best mining. And the company is working on a search platform that spans across P2P platforms.

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The company is led by chief executive Ed Kozel, who among other positions was former chief technology officer at Cisco. It was co-founded by Ori Cohen and Stas Khirman, the guys behind Narus (a company that inspects internet protocol packet information, and thus provides relevant experience) and previously, VDOnet (which in the mid-1990s, was already in the business of transmitting video over the Internet).

They want to do three things:

1) Keyword-based search marketing (there are as many as tens of millions of unique users per day, conducting hundreds of millions of searches, the company says);

2) Unrestricted access to content (a P2P search can poll millions of network computers simultaneously at effectively no cost, they say);

3) New software and applications (once businesses reach P2P users, they can build upon the “decentralized, dynamic and community” nature of P2P technology, they say).