[Search-l] Any updates?

[Rainer Blome]

Whoa, cool it, there's no need to be offended.
Yes, I wrote in a not entirely subdued tone, in order to show some 
feeling and maybe get a reaction.

Paul Vixie wrote:
> newsmarkie at googlemail.com ("Mark (Markie)") writes:
>> as for the fact that wikia is a for profit, i cant see, at this time it
>> affecting us.  they have provided huge amounts of resources, 

That much I guessed.

> i've been pushing jer and the others to move the servers out of swlabs.com
> and into search.isc.org.  the servers were donated to isc, not wikia.  the
> bandwidth they use is provided by isc.  wikia has donated a 15-ton air
> conditioner, a smattering of network switches and front end servers, and a
> heaping lot of jer's time and other wikia staff time.  wikia has agreed in
> principal to underwrite the power costs of the isc physical plant used by
> the crawlers and indexers.  but as for a "diff org" there already is one 
> (see www.isc.org, ugly though it is)

The ISC page even shows Wikia Search as a news item.

> and i think it's odd that anybody is still worried about that part. 
> ISC is a 501(c)(3) whose mission is public benefit.

That's because "somebody" didn't know about this constellation.
This is a positive surprise to me.  Great (no irony here)!

Admittedly, searching the web for "wikia and ISC" shows some of this, at 
least now it does.
But to group (c) (wiki users such as me, many of whom got to know the 
project only in January), this was almost undetectable.
To find out about this on your own, reading only the wiki, is next to 
impossible.  See http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Asearch.wikia.com+isc
, which results in a whopping six hits, all of which are rather hard to 
stumble upon by by coincidence.  Effectively you have to know what you 
are looking for before you'll even notice it.

The Search Wikia "about" page should note this.
So much for transparency, so far.

> if anybody here thinks we're either incompetent or untrustworthy
> with regard to owning and operating a search engine backend, i'd thank you
> very much to call me on the phone and explain your concerns to me realtime.

Nobody doubted ISC, as far as I see.

>>>> Wikia ... can pull the plug at any time.  As long as this is so, I invest
>>>> only a little time in it.  ...
> 
> that isn't so.  please feel free to invest as much time as you have into it.

At least I'll feel less foolish when I do ;-).

>>>> In the long run, we need an independent, not-for-profit
>>>> search infrastructure, similar to Wikipedia.
> 
> you have that.  wikia foresaw a need for that in the earliest days, which is
> how ISC got involved in the first place.  

Thanks for enlightening me.

Rainer