[Search-l] Short interview with Jeremie Miller

[jer]

> 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.

Alexa has been selling access to this for years, fettered by money.   
We'll have open access, fettered by the social dynamics of a wiki.

> That's the disturbing part for search engine operators - what is to  
> stop an MFA using this data to flood search engines?

Us.

>> 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.

I'm not sure in what secret meeting you were appointed minister of  
all small-search-operators, but I've met lots of others and feel bad  
for how you're portraying them.  I will only speak for myself though,  
I'm just trying to do something helpful for the whole search  
industry, it's time to evolve beyond your ruthless empires.  Search  
is too important to humanity to be left to waste like this.

>> 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.

It will be interesting, fun and useful I sure hope, and it's not just  
people, it's a combination of both open source tools/automation *and*  
people helping to guide/correct it.

Jer