[Search-l] Fwd: Wikia Press Release on search project

[Aerik Sylvan]

Jer,
Cool!  Glad to see you / this announcement.  Even the bazaar development
model needs leadership.

> I do have a bunch of ideas/discussions that, like everyone should,
> I'll be sending to the list and putting on the wiki as I find time.
> If it isn't obvious, one of the areas I'll personally be coding and
> developing is around an open protocol and how it can play what I
> think is a very cool role in building a search technology community.
> For those that noticed my post here in Jan, I've been working on
> ideas for the protocol for some time now.

I look forward to reading about your protocol.  In the short term, can you
share more detail about the scope and purpose?  You made some statements in
the Jan post that could be interpreted as allowing for the possibility of
sharing different kind of search related data being passed to and from
servers and/or clients.  Perhaps some kind of very flexible
indexing/searching API ?  Perhaps in the vision that Jimmy has been hinting
at, the search project can be semi-decentralized?  He's mentioned finding
partners in second tier engines - if the protocol supported sharing some of
the data collection and analysis necessary to search, the load could be
spread between wikia's servers and it's partners'.

Abstracting in another direction, and given some of the brainstorming that's
been done on this list, allowing for the possibilities of different kinds of
data (not just certain predefined search functions/factors/data) will
support the evolution and growth of the project.  (What I'm thinking of is
that we've discussed everything from "traditional" search algorithms, to
wiki style directory entries, to tagging, to hybrids of those approaches) -
so an protocol supporting an extensible api would be required to accommodate
all that... (?)

It's an exciting thought, and we'd love to hear more about your plans and
vision!

Aerik
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