"The utopia of Internet search engines? That's gone," said Andrew Wetzler, president of MoreVisibility.com, a search engine optimization company. That's good for Wetzler and businesses like his that help companies get better placement in search engines. But for anyone who sees the web as more than just a place to buy an air purifier from Sharper Image, it stinks.

Now, I like plenty of commercial stuff online, but the problem is that there's no balance on search sites today. As with every previous Internet marketing fad, search engine marketing, which is hot right now, is being grossly abused. With most sites biasing their own results with a number of paid offerings, the balance of educational information and commercial content-in other words, what made the web interesting in the mid-1990s-is being lost. You simply can't find the non-commercial stuff. It's also clear that existing search engines, using their current approaches, will never be able to keep up with the Web's explosive growth-Google indexes about 3 billion pages, but conservative estimates place the Web's size at 10 billion pages-so a new idea is welcome in these quarters.

One hope: Grub (http://www.grub.org/). Grub is a project that wants to index the entire Internet. Every day. It works much like the SETI@Home project that's looking for intelligent life in the universe by harnessing what's known as grid computing, accessing the collective power of the online community's unused computing resources through a screensaver you install. Grid computing has its skeptics, and of course, having the X-Files crowd as its poster child doesn't necessarily aid its credibility. But Grub needs only perhaps 100,000 users to start to achieve its goal, and in just a month, it already has about 10,000 active users running the screensaver.

Grub started a couple of years ago as an independent venture by the owner of an Oklahoma-based ISP and has recently been acquired and launched by LookSmart, traditionally a second-tier player in search and one of the more aggressive players in putting for-sale signs on Net real estate. Grub's creator, Kord Campbell, and LookSmart execs say in interviews that they want to create a "DNS system for websites," meaning that they would create a central registry for web pages. Once you know about every site out there, the thinking goes, then you can share that information -- and do some interesting things with it. Examples mentioned include true interpretative search, using the power of the grid to determine whether you meant soups, securities, or 17th-century punishment devices when you typed in "stocks." Or you could create a database that was totally free of dead links that clog up a lot of search results.

Questions remain about the viability of Grub. Is there anything worth finding in the pages not searched today, or like the early shrimp boat scenes in "Forrest Gump," will Grub just bring back the rusty tin cans and waterlogged boots of the Internet? There have to be some uncaught prawns out there, because Google's searching technique relies too much on popularity and influence, and as most of us remember from high school, just because you're popular doesn't mean you're interesting, and vice versa. Even if it is just muddy Mountain Dew bottles that get caught in Grub's wide net, there will always be someone who's searching for just that and will be happy.

Of course, there's still the issue of whether LookSmart, whose track record of search integrity has more holes in it than 50 Cent, is the best company to find the hidden web. The LookSmart execs I spoke with seemed genuine in their desire to give back to the Net community, knowing how much money they make from paid inclusion. Their intent to double-check the veracity of the index they compile and then make it available to anyone who wants to build an application on top of it is the kind of web-friendly idea that you don't hear much of anymore. And it may just mean that LookSmart, one of the few search engines still out there that never was a one-hit wonder, has the ideal business model that balances search engines' commercial and consumer responsibilities.

So maybe the idea of a search utopia isn't dead yet.