5 ms·

No 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 7y ago
It'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 7y ago
  >> Most of the world's knowledge is not public Where is it found ?
  - shereadsthenews 7y ago
    Not sure if this is what they meant but email is thought to be larger in aggregate than the web.
  - walterbell 7y ago
    There'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 7y ago
I 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 7y ago
I can't be the only person who uses Google Alerts.

walterbell 7y ago

It'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 7y ago
>> Most of the world's knowledge is not public Where is it found ?
- shereadsthenews 7y ago
  Not sure if this is what they meant but email is thought to be larger in aggregate than the web.
- walterbell 7y ago
  There'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 7y ago

I 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 7y ago

I can't be the only person who uses Google Alerts.