Webaroo: Your Local Internet

Is it possible to search Internet without Internet access? Sure. For that you only need to copy the World Wide Web on your PC, laptop or even PDA. Sure, it all sounds quite absurd. But actually it is obvious that any given Internet user does not visit all the websites on the WWW – only a certain number of them. So if you copy them and store the copy on your hard drive, you will be able to find something without being connected to the Internet.

This is exactly the principle behind California-based Webaroo that has been reported today to raise $7.5 million of a $10 million second round funding.

Webaroo splits thousands of gigabytes into quite compact “Web Packs”, each of them devoted to a certain topic, e.g. encyclopedias, news, travel, etc. Size of every pack is reasonable enough and varies from 5 to 40 Gb.

A user installs free software and Web Packs on his device and can use them offline. Such a service is quite needed if we take into account the fact that even in the US there are still places without Internet access. Besides, would not you want to surf the web when you are on a plane, for example?

And when you are online again, the software automatically synchronizes your packs. This way you will have current information when you surf the web offline again.

Webaroo software can be downloaded here for free. Another good thing is that synchronization of Web Packs should only take a few minutes. So why don’t we take advantage of the opportunity and search Wikipedia offline?