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

[John McCormac]

Peter Saint-Andre wrote:
> 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.

The whole "search" thing is irrelevant? Wikia is building a business. It 
wants the people here to build the search aspect. The idea that they are 
building an internet infrastructure is nice but it is just a theory and 
an easy out when faced with hard questions.

> 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 basically you think that what Wikia is doing is creating the web - 
capturing the vital spark that turned a vision of seamless information 
flow into reality? It is a bit grandiose to compare Wikia with something 
that changed history. What you don't seem to understand about that time 
is the demand for change that existed. The network existed at the time 
but the connection paths were sparse, often limited to slow modems on 
dialup connections. HTML was a wonderfully compact solution for this 
kind of network. This is quite different to the search market where 
there are key players who dominate the market. The barriers to entry to 
the outer edges of the market are low but they rise exponentially as you 
approach the centre of the market where Google/Yahoo/Microsoft dominate. 
The cost of taking them on is also high because they are so well funded. 
So a trivial few million dollars is not quite in the same league as an 
organisation worth billions with tens of thousands of employees, many of 
whom are working on search problems and have solved the problems that 
this open search infrastructure is meant to solve.

The talk of an open search infrastructure sounds like the realisation of 
not having a hope of being a Google Killer. Perhaps it is an interesting 
redirection and it might work. But it has to be built. As for the 
infrastructure for search - that's hardware. Thousands of boxes, 
networks, data storage and a lot of people to run the thing. Anything 
less is niche.

> 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.

Such changes require a critical mass, a conglomeration of 
superconnectors and above all, people to do the work. This concentration 
of effort and expertise does not happen by itself. Merely talking about 
things does not make them happen. The work has to be done otherwise it 
just becomes another talking shop.

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

I don't know if we can afford to waste that amount of time waiting for 
answers that may never come.

Regards...jmcc
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