Too bad this came out before Drew intended, and I hope that after having a weekend to rest he’ll feel his motivation recover. One meta-thought, I think project

Too bad this came out before Drew intended, and I hope that after having a weekend to rest he’ll feel his motivation recover. One meta-thought, I think projects like this are surfacing something interesting: The underlying technology to make a pretty good search engine is no longer especially difficult for programmers or for server. This is potentially a very good thing, as it means the end of the Google era. I can imagine a future that is almost a blast from the past, where there are a lot of different search engines, those engines are curated differently, and while none of them index the entire Internet, that’s what makes them valuable and better than Google (which I think cannot defeat spam). I’m trying to think of a historical parallel, Where are some service used to be very difficult to provide and therefore could only effectively be done by a single natural monopoly, but technology progressed and opened up the playing field, breaking the monopoly. Television has some similarities. Perhaps radio vs podcasting. What others?