There is nothing that can’t be “beaten” through research and technology.
I mean, someday, we will be encasing entire stars in artificial shells and creating black holes of our own. What’s a single corporate entity that managed to get a lead in barely the first stages of a relatively new industry?*
How about incorporating search tech into web servers themselves? Move it to the level of DNS And other core protocols. Make individual servers automatically index all content that passes through them. They could then populate special caching servers with the indexes and results. When a user searches for something, the query gets sent to successive search-cache servers, kinda like a DNS lookup, until match is found or up to a browser-specified depth.
—
* People generally did not care much about search engines at the beginning; they usually just had a small list of sites in their memory or bookmarks that they visited regularly, and found others through magazines, links or word-of-mouth. Search engines were merely a hit-or-miss convenience, often used for porn or “wares” I’d wager, then that convenience emerged to become the core way of discovering and interacting with the internet.
Does anyone here remember the point when they “switched” to using Google? I personally can’t recall myself ever doing that. I think it just happened casually, through a browser that defaulted to Google. I remember thinking how ugly Google’s UI was, and preferred other engines for their “looks.” But at someone point, Googling just became faster than any other way to get to what I felt like looking up.
For now, I do wish browsers would start offering Wikipedia as an option for the default search. :)
I mean, someday, we will be encasing entire stars in artificial shells and creating black holes of our own. What’s a single corporate entity that managed to get a lead in barely the first stages of a relatively new industry?*
How about incorporating search tech into web servers themselves? Move it to the level of DNS And other core protocols. Make individual servers automatically index all content that passes through them. They could then populate special caching servers with the indexes and results. When a user searches for something, the query gets sent to successive search-cache servers, kinda like a DNS lookup, until match is found or up to a browser-specified depth.
—
* People generally did not care much about search engines at the beginning; they usually just had a small list of sites in their memory or bookmarks that they visited regularly, and found others through magazines, links or word-of-mouth. Search engines were merely a hit-or-miss convenience, often used for porn or “wares” I’d wager, then that convenience emerged to become the core way of discovering and interacting with the internet.
Does anyone here remember the point when they “switched” to using Google? I personally can’t recall myself ever doing that. I think it just happened casually, through a browser that defaulted to Google. I remember thinking how ugly Google’s UI was, and preferred other engines for their “looks.” But at someone point, Googling just became faster than any other way to get to what I felt like looking up.
For now, I do wish browsers would start offering Wikipedia as an option for the default search. :)