6 ms·

It's a hybrid engine. I do my own crawling and indexing in addition to relying on external APIs. For the APIs I use, I've built a lot of relevancy and other log

It's a hybrid engine. I do my own crawling and indexing in addition to relying on external APIs. For the APIs I use, I've built a lot of relevancy and other logic on top of them so they often don't look the same as if you'd query them directly. I started out exclusively with my own stuff, and then started using BOSS when it came out so I could focus on what I think are my value-adds. Now I use a bunch of stuff (including my own). My approach is to just be a better search engine. If an API does something awesome, e.g. WolframAlpha or embed.ly, I figure why not use it.

pavs 16y ago
Do you think in the future you might exclusively use your own index and not be depended on others? Let's say hypothetically tomorrow, all the search API you rely on, decides to cut you off, what then? How good is your own index by itself? Just to be clear, I am not dissing on you, it takes a lot of gutso to take on search engine market alone, I applaud you for that, I don't see myself having that much guts to do it. I am trying to be realist about the meta-hybrid-search engine.
- epi0Bauqu 16y ago
  I treat the deep Web search APIs as essentially commodities of the link graph. I was able to seamlessly switch between BOSS and Bing without anyone noticing. And there are several others I can use as well. So I don't feel much danger here. And now that BOSS is going to charge, I feel even less danger because it is turning into a real product. My index is not usable in this fashion. I've re-purposed it mainly for 0-click and for spam removal. Frankly though, I don't see why this comes up so much. Infospace is a public company that relies on other indexes pretty much exclusively. In other verticals, people routinely use more exclusive platforms, e.g. Twitter or Facebook or banking stuff.

6 ms·

It's a hybrid engine. I do my own crawling and indexing in addition to relying on external APIs. For the APIs I use, I've built a lot of relevancy and other log

by epi0Bauqu 16y ago

pavs 16y ago
Do you think in the future you might exclusively use your own index and not be depended on others? Let's say hypothetically tomorrow, all the search API you rely on, decides to cut you off, what then? How good is your own index by itself? Just to be clear, I am not dissing on you, it takes a lot of gutso to take on search engine market alone, I applaud you for that, I don't see myself having that much guts to do it. I am trying to be realist about the meta-hybrid-search engine.
- epi0Bauqu 16y ago
  I treat the deep Web search APIs as essentially commodities of the link graph. I was able to seamlessly switch between BOSS and Bing without anyone noticing. And there are several others I can use as well. So I don't feel much danger here. And now that BOSS is going to charge, I feel even less danger because it is turning into a real product. My index is not usable in this fashion. I've re-purposed it mainly for 0-click and for spam removal. Frankly though, I don't see why this comes up so much. Infospace is a public company that relies on other indexes pretty much exclusively. In other verticals, people routinely use more exclusive platforms, e.g. Twitter or Facebook or banking stuff.