HOSTED SEARCHING OF PRIVATE LOCAL AREA NETWORK INFORMATION

Hosted searching of different local area network (LAN) information is described. The apparatus for hosted searching of different private LAN information includes a LAN crawler to automatically and repeatedly crawl a LAN having multiple devices, and a hosted on-demand search system including a set of one or more centralized-search servers to create and synchronize a separate private search database for each of the private LANs based on received reports from of different instances of the LAN crawler deployed on the multiple private LANs, at least some of which are operated by different entities.