Yes, Japan too. This news has been announced several times in the last six months or so, and there is no real new news in the latest annoucement. It may be indicative of the fact that things are moving forward.
However, how a consortium of 30 organisations, many whom are fierce rivals, are going to coordinate an effort to have a working system up and running in less than 2 years is still unclear. Too many cooks spoil the broth, and all that.
They’ll probably spend the first 18 months holding weekly committee meetings discussing the proposed draft architecture specifications documentation (and spending the time in between producing said documentation, which will be printed out onto paper and distributed to committee members so that they can read it together at said meetings)
It will be interesting to see whether they can come up with an algorithm that can return more relevant search results than the current ones. If you think English search results are not great, try the additional complexity of a language that uses four scripts – English letters, katakana, hiragana and kanji. A native Japanese-developed solution may do better than something built on a search engine originally developed for the English-speaking market.
Yes, Japan too. This news has been announced several times in the last six months or so, and there is no real new news in the latest annoucement. It may be indicative of the fact that things are moving forward.
However, how a consortium of 30 organisations, many whom are fierce rivals, are going to coordinate an effort to have a working system up and running in less than 2 years is still unclear. Too many cooks spoil the broth, and all that.
They’ll probably spend the first 18 months holding weekly committee meetings discussing the proposed draft architecture specifications documentation (and spending the time in between producing said documentation, which will be printed out onto paper and distributed to committee members so that they can read it together at said meetings)
It will be interesting to see whether they can come up with an algorithm that can return more relevant search results than the current ones. If you think English search results are not great, try the additional complexity of a language that uses four scripts – English letters, katakana, hiragana and kanji. A native Japanese-developed solution may do better than something built on a search engine originally developed for the English-speaking market.