I see that the new era in search would involve a variety of distributed indexes to be available to searchers.

This Peer to Peer network of repositories would allow many organizations to process and summarize the data in any way they wished.

One interesting thing is that the founders of Google themselves ‘were’ advocates of distributing indexing, here is a quote from their research paper, 2nd to last paragraph.

Of course a distributed systems like Gloss [Gravano 94] or Harvest will often be the most efficient and elegant technical solution for indexing, but it seems difficult to convince the world to use these systems because of the high administration costs of setting up large numbers of installations. Of course, it is quite likely that reducing the administration cost drastically is possible. If that happens, and everyone starts running a distributed indexing system, searching would certainly improve drastically.

-Sergey Brin and Lawrence “PageRank” Page

My blog regarding my take on this, is at

wakeupweb2.blogspot.com

Let me know if you have any feedback, I’m still working on some more declared weaknesses of the current status quo, and building a list of early adopters and ways to evangelize the initiative.

Thanks,

Matt Robson

http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/danzig91distributed.html

(this site is sometimes down)

Record created on 12-Aug-1998…

Bertelsmann lacks that edge.

My company has done this for our tiny little market in Iceland, but there are similar opportunities in other European markets (and probably all over the world).

This fight will not be won with sheer money, but with smart innovations and dedication and understanding of the fact that the rest-of-the-world is a pretty a big market. Europe in fact counts more people than the USA and the market here grows a lot faster. Spending 300 million dollars on a French search engine is a pretty high amount “per capita”.

One size doesn’t fit all and search engines need to pay attention to the details of local markets. Google in fact sometimes does exactly the opposite – some of their services are hard or even impossible to access from outside the US. The new Google Video Store is a good – but far from the only – example.

Haven’t we learned over and over that you cannot buy ideas: look at Microsoft’s cash horde.

Google and Yahoo may indeed find a challenger from outside the US. Great development.