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The ideal breakup would be between search engine and index. The index should be treated as a utility like water or electric that search engines purchase access
by pydry 3y ago
The ideal breakup would be between search engine and index.
The index should be treated as a utility like water or electric that search engines purchase access to for a regulated fee.
You can then have a thousand competing search engines started in garages with their own ranking algorithms and ads but realistically there are only ever going to be a few indexes. Thats the part that requires enormous data centers and dedicated power stations to run.
- chx 3y agoI doubt this is feasible, there's a lot that goes into the index which determines which kinds of queries you can even run.
- pydry 3y agoWhy? As a supplier of an API to search engine "customers" their entire job would just be to service that demand and provide new query options. The intra-engine competition, meanwhile, would drive up results quality. Search engines would rise and fall on their own merits rather than on the basis that theyve got access to the biggest index.
- chx 3y agoBut part of the competition is the index quality. For example, it's a lot easier to provide a keyword index than a phrase index. There's code search which is almost orthogonal to what ordinary search wants separators wise etc
- pydry 3y agoI dont doubt that. The point of regulating it as a utility isnt that theres nothing to compete over but that the barrier to entry is so high that you can't simply rely on the market to provide competition.