4 ms·

Forget the technical merit, I want to discuss your point. I'm pretty sure one of the signs of the apocalypse starts with the phrase "Google, Bing and Yahoo uni

Forget the technical merit, I want to discuss your point. I'm pretty sure one of the signs of the apocalypse starts with the phrase "Google, Bing and Yahoo unite...". When I see that phrase my spidey sense tingles in a decidedly non 'warm fuzzy' fashion! One of the three will probably try to sabotage this. Likely, one will contribute something to the standard without informing the others that it is patent encumbered, then submarine them. Others my feel free to weigh in on my paranoia.

fragsworth 15y ago
I can't imagine "tagging with metadata" to be very patentable. It's too ubiquitous. Then again, it wouldn't really surprise me.
andrewcross 15y ago
I agree with camiller! The technical part of the article isn't the interesting point. It's the fact that the big boys were able to join together and create something for good! Let's hope "Don't Be Evil" is infectious and no one goes after each other.
sullivandanny 15y ago
Sitemaps was the last big thing they united on. It's been very helpful to have. Years before that, they agreed on meta description tags and robots.txt blocking. The latter helped keep many web sites from being overwhelmed by requests, yet enabled search engines to grow. I think it's a good thing.
contextfree 15y ago
Maybe you'll feel better, and 51Cards will feel worse, if you think of it as "companies who have invested in search engines unite to give themselves more competitive advantage over companies who have not invested in search engines, such as Apple" =)
baguasquirrel 15y ago
They are agreeing on a protocol, they aren't saying that they're going to share their mined and ranked data. No way in Hell is Google going to agree to that. My bet is that Google is worried about its relevance in a world where an increasing amount of the data is not accessible to its crawlers. This is not just FB and Twitter, but Yelp and GroupOn traffic as well. That's where Yahoo and MSFT come in. By agreeing to standardize search APIs, they can hope to net more of the developer mindshare. Now, instead of this just being "lets program for Twitter or FB's or Google", this becomes "lets program for one of the social networks, or for search". Google doesn't lose the monetarily valuable human-driven search results, and YHOO and MSFT get to take a risk that they will be able to monetize potentially valuable developer-driven search along with Google. The thing that's funny about this is that no one seems to have figured out how to monetize APIs yet. If anyone is going to figure it out, it may well be Twitter because it is life or death for them. But Buzz goes to show how much Twitter envy there is going on at Google. They're concerned that if there is a way to monetize that traffic, then they will be shut out. Better to take a larger share of the pie with YHOO and MSFT than for traditionally-crawled to get shut out of the party.

fragsworth 15y ago

I can't imagine "tagging with metadata" to be very patentable. It's too ubiquitous. Then again, it wouldn't really surprise me.

andrewcross 15y ago

I agree with camiller! The technical part of the article isn't the interesting point. It's the fact that the big boys were able to join together and create something for good! Let's hope "Don't Be Evil" is infectious and no one goes after each other.

sullivandanny 15y ago

Sitemaps was the last big thing they united on. It's been very helpful to have. Years before that, they agreed on meta description tags and robots.txt blocking. The latter helped keep many web sites from being overwhelmed by requests, yet enabled search engines to grow. I think it's a good thing.

contextfree 15y ago

Maybe you'll feel better, and 51Cards will feel worse, if you think of it as "companies who have invested in search engines unite to give themselves more competitive advantage over companies who have not invested in search engines, such as Apple" =)

baguasquirrel 15y ago

They are agreeing on a protocol, they aren't saying that they're going to share their mined and ranked data. No way in Hell is Google going to agree to that. My bet is that Google is worried about its relevance in a world where an increasing amount of the data is not accessible to its crawlers. This is not just FB and Twitter, but Yelp and GroupOn traffic as well. That's where Yahoo and MSFT come in. By agreeing to standardize search APIs, they can hope to net more of the developer mindshare. Now, instead of this just being "lets program for Twitter or FB's or Google", this becomes "lets program for one of the social networks, or for search". Google doesn't lose the monetarily valuable human-driven search results, and YHOO and MSFT get to take a risk that they will be able to monetize potentially valuable developer-driven search along with Google. The thing that's funny about this is that no one seems to have figured out how to monetize APIs yet. If anyone is going to figure it out, it may well be Twitter because it is life or death for them. But Buzz goes to show how much Twitter envy there is going on at Google. They're concerned that if there is a way to monetize that traffic, then they will be shut out. Better to take a larger share of the pie with YHOO and MSFT than for traditionally-crawled to get shut out of the party.