[Search-l] Short interview with Jeremie Miller

[John McCormac]

jer wrote:
> To make this damn clear, I'm not here to build another search engine, 

So the Google Killer is a thing of the past then? :) It looks like 
Wikiasearch will have to come up with a new angle - perhaps "the 
commoditisation of search". Or even "ubiquitisation of search". Or 
sticking with the biological examples, "grow your own search engine with 
Wikia". :) Don't worry though - technology journalists rarely have a 
clue about technology and will perpetually be in awe of the latest well 
crafted marketing slogan.

> I'm here to make sure that everyone else can.  This isn't about one 
> company or one person, it's just about making the tools and services for 
> search more open and accessible to *everybody*.

Seth's point about Wikia programming jobs being outsourced to Poland is 
an important one. I wonder how American programmers feel about having 
their jobs "Open Sourced" to Poland in the name of Wikia's profit. 
Despite all your happy clappy cheer leading Jer, that is a sad betrayal 
of American programmers by Wikia.

But getting back to the core issues - what tools and services (beyond 
the repackaged content and managed/targeted crawling) is Wikia going to 
provide? Nutch, Mnogosearch, Datapark and a few others already offer the 
search engine software. It is possible to get a relatively high spec 
server for a few hundred Dollars a month these days and the price of 
bandwidth has fallen dramatically in the last few years. So what will 
Wikia offer that adds to what is already available?

And what happens if *everybody* does not want to build their own search 
engine? The tools are there for everyone to build to build their own 
webpages and yet most do not do it. The more I look at this project and 
its spiral from Google Killer to search toolbox, the more I wonder if 
Wikia is a transplant from the dot.bomb era. Still though, let's be 
optimistic and hope that something does appear in December.

Regards...jmcc
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