[Search-l] Short interview with Jeremie Miller

[John McCormac]

jer wrote:
> Wow, you really tried hard to make it sound so awful :)
> 
> Yes to all of the above, it'll of course follow all the rules like  
> current cached results and the Wayback Machine do as far as copyright  
> goes, and anyone can already crawl, I just want to lower the barrier  
> and increase the collaboration between those trying to do good with  it, 
> be it search or research.

The Wayback Machine does tend to limit access to website only. But then 
you have to know the website you want to check. The Wikiasearch project 
wants to provide unfettered access to the data. That's the disturbing 
part for search engine operators - what is to stop an MFA using this 
data to flood search engines?

> And what a horrible state to be in,

Yeah. But that's reality, Jer. :) But in order to survive we all have to 
have some warrior spirit (and the idea that we can win) and the empires 
and city states is the best way to describe the search market at the 
moment. Search empires rise and fall (altavista etc). Country level and 
niche search engines tend to dominate if successful and they will fight 
ruthlessly to protect their markets. Alliances are formed and sometimes, 
the big empires like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft can be defeated on 
small battlegrounds. Unless you've gone head to head against the major 
search engines, it is difficult to understand the mentality. Happy 
clappy we are not. Everything we do is geared towards survival.

> If an open community of enthusiasts can't collectively add value  here, 
> and can't monitor for abuse, then we've done something wrong...  perhaps 
> only time will tell.

Well it should be interesting to see. How exactly can a bunch of 
enthusiasts monitor for abuse? The fundamental flaw in this is that 
search and the facilities to detect and remove spam and abuse are highly 
automated. Wikiasearch seems to be going back to the Infinite Monkeys 
approach of replacing highly automated systems with manual ones.

Regards...jmcc
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