Julian, I'm not sure I understand your proposal, but I do think what Google does is not something trivial, straightforward or easy to automate. I remember reading an article about Google's ranking strategy. IIRC, they use the patterns of mutual linking between websites. So far, so good. But then, when Google became popular, some companies started to build link farms, to make themselves look more important to Google. When Google finds out about this behavior, they kick the company to the bottom of the index. I'm sure they have many secret automated schemes to do this kind of thing, but it's essentially an arms race, and it takes constant human attention. Local search is much less problematic, but still you can end up with a huge pile of unstructured data, or a huge bowl of linked spaghetti mess, so it may well make sense to ask a third party for help to sort it out.
I don't think there's anything architecturally centralized about using Google as a search engine, it's just a matter of popularity. You also have Bing, Duckduckgo, whatever. On the other hand, data storage and bandwidth are very centralized. Dropbox, Google docs, iCloud, are all sympthoms of the fact that PC operating systems were designed for local storage. I've been looking at possible alternatives. There's distributed fault-tolerant network filesystems like Xtreemfs (and even the Linux-based XtreemOS), or Tahoe-LAFS (with object-capabilities!), or maybe a more P2P approach such as Tribler (a tracker-free bittorrent), and for shared bandwidth apparently there is a BittorrentLive (P2P streaming). But I don't know how to put all that together into a usable computing experience. For instance, squeak is a single file image, so I guess it can't benefit from file-based capabilities, except if the objects were mapped to files in some way. Oh, well, this is for another thread. -Best Martin On Fri, Mar 2, 2012 at 6:54 AM, Julian Leviston <jul...@leviston.net> wrote: > Right you are. Centralised search seems a bit silly to me. > > Take object orientedism and apply it to search and you get a thing where > each node searches itself when asked... apply this to a local-focussed > topology (ie spider web serch out) and utilise intelligent caching (so > search the localised caches first) and you get a better thing, no? > > Why not do it like that? Or am I limited in my thinking about this? > > Julian > > On 02/03/2012, at 4:26 AM, David Barbour wrote: > _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
