Boogle is a search engine specifically designed to catalog shared files on local networks. Boogle "spiders" an assigned set of IP addresses, looking for computers that have SMB sharing enabled. SMB is a standard protocol created by Microsoft for local file sharing. The "Network Neighborhood" utilizes SMB. When Boogle finds a computer with SMB enabled, it adds that computer to a host list. Boogle then scans that computer for open file shares. If a share is not password protected (or the password is blank), Boogle recurses through that computer's directories and catalogues any files it finds.

Boogle does not store files. It simply catalogues open (public) shares and maintains a listing of the files it has found. Users can then use the Boogle web interface to query the database and find relevent files. Boogle rescans each computer every 12 hours, in addition to performing hourly "uptime" checks to establish a reliabilty average for each computer on the network.

Boogle is run by a system called BranScan which was created and maintained free of charge by a group of people.. Boogle is released under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

Complete server statistics including the number and size of files indexed is available on the stats page. While Boogle does not store any files itself, we are concerned about both privacy and legality. For that reason, we keep no records linking visitors to search queries. We do keep aggregate data on what searches are performed and how many unique visitors have used this site. We will not release any of this information (except such as is publically available on the stats page) without a court order.

Additionally, we are concerned about theft of intellectual property and copyright infringement. While Boogle does not and cannot technically filter files by name or content, we are willing and able to remove any illegal files from our indexes. We will do so upon request from an appropriate legal entity, and will do so within 48 hours of notice. We encourage copyright owners to content the owners of file servers directly to avoid having said files appear in our database again in the next scan.

There is no need nor reason to have more than one Boogle service running on a network. More than one service will in no way improve accuracy or performance and will simply serve to annoy network admins and slow down network traffic. Additially, software such as ShareScan is even more network-intensive and, ultimately, less useful and efficient anyway. We encourage you to avoid any such programs.

Any questions, comments, and correspondance can be directed to the site operator, cog@brandeis.edu.