[Search-l] Wikia - Global focus or country level search?

[Peter Saint-Andre]

John McCormac wrote:
> Search is a business. 

You seem to misunderstand the focus. The folks here are not building a
business. They are building Internet infrastructure.

Think HTTP+HTML, not Yahoo or Google.

Imagine that hypertext was a big business in 1991. Tim Berners-Lee is
working to build infrastructure. You tell him he's a loser because he's
not trying to compete with the hypertext companies. Instead, he has this
vague idea of people posting and editing physics papers and maybe a wide
range of other services using the same underlying technology.

Pipe dream. Aimless vision. No one project. No one strategy. No lock-in.
No business model.

What a loser!

And yet everything we're doing today was built on that foundation.

Search is as important to our future as hypertext was back in '91. But
building an infrastructure for search is a hard problem. It will take
years of work behind the scenes. At this point we're at the stage of
laying the pipes and defining the protocols. Once that work is done,
many projects and companies will come together using the core protocols.
An ecosystem will form (not one project, not one company, but a free
market of projects and companies).

So if you're looking for those projects and companies at this stage, you
are fooling yourself. It's way too early for that. But it will come.
We've seen the same forces at work on the web (HTTP+HTML), and with
technologies such as IM (XMPP) and VoIP (SIP).

My advice is to come back in a few years and ask your questions again.
The answers may surprise you.

Peter

-- 
Peter Saint-Andre
https://stpeter.im/

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