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This is the problem with this idea. Format of the index will be intricately tied to the algorithms that are meant to traverse it. The production of a search r
by shereadsthenews 8y ago
This is the problem with this idea. Format of the index will be intricately tied to the algorithms that are meant to traverse it. The production of a search result by Google or Bing in a fraction of a second is an outright miracle of software engineering. If this open index service provides something developers can easily understand and consume, such as a term-doc hitlist with a simple encoding, it will be enormous, expensive, and impractical to traverse.
- walterbell 8y agoGoogle needs sub-second response to show ads. Some users may be happy to wait for hours or days to get high quality answers not available from commercial companies. Can still be faster than emailing a human friend or consultant or tasking an employee or department.
- AndyPatterson 8y agoNo idea where you got this statisti, but I guarantee no user would be happy to wait hours or (god forbid) days on a search result.
- walterbell 8y agoIt's still sooner than "never", which is the current response time for answers that Google cannot provide. Central search indexes like Google are not going away. There are client-side metasearch interfaces that combine Google results with other sources. Those other sources can be much slower, including human responses. You would still have your synchronous sub-second response from centralized search, but there would be asynchronous results from decentralized search. This exists today, e.g. when you post a question on HN or a messaging app, asking other humans for answers not available in public indexes. Most of the world's knowledge is not public, it's obscure and may only be of interest to specific niche audiences.
- petra 8y ago>> Most of the world's knowledge is not public Where is it found ?
- shereadsthenews 8y agoNot sure if this is what they meant but email is thought to be larger in aggregate than the web.
- walterbell 8y agoThere's a long list, including private correspondence, commercial journals, proprietary databases, trade secrets, internal corporate data sets, private archives, financial trade data, classified national databases. That was before the rise of FAANG, big data, proprietary analysis / inferences / knowledge graphs derived from public data sources, metadata traffic analysis, and advertising surveillance business models. I can't find a reference at the moment, but this topic was covered in a professional journal for historians.
- rabidrat 8y agoI would gladly wait hours or days for certain long-tail searches; the kind that I revisit every few days/weeks/months for half an hour trying various search terms to see if I can crack the code and find the content that I know is out there somewhere. I imagine getting status updates with intermediate search results, and I annotate each one with 'warm' or 'cold' and maybe add some more search terms into the hopper to forcibly narrow or expand the search.
- jpindar 8y agoI can't be the only person who uses Google Alerts.