Sphinx is Urbit’s first search engine. Unlike traditional web search engines, sphinx uses a gossip mechanism originally found in ~paldev’s rumors, so that anything you and your pals post is shared to your pals, as well as pals of pals.
You can currently submit and search for applications, groups, and content (notebooks and collections), as well as browse by tag.
Peat is Urbit’s first backup utility. Prior to Peat, there was no easy way to backup content from groups from your ship aside from copying your entire urbit. Peat makes it easy to export all your data from Groups, which uses the graph-store data structure, and in the future will provide support for the new structure in Tlon’s upcoming Groups revamp.
In this podcast Urbit Foundation Executive Director Josh Lehman provides a broad overview of that state of Urbit as of 2022, and what people can expecture in the near future and beyond.