- DeWitt Clinton from Google is moderating. Open Search he says started when he was at A9.
- Brewster Kahle (famous guy who did the Internet archive)
- Brian McConnell of WWLexicon project
- Andrew Turner from Mapufacture
- Danny Sullivan of Daily Search Cast/SMX conference
- Biz dev guy from Yahoo
- Doug Cutting who created the Nutch search engine
- Adam Bosworth from Google
http://au.blog.360.yahoo.com/yalphabeta
http://au.alpha.yahoo.com/
I'm trying to get my head around what is going on here. A9/Amazon started a search engine that had an open source protocol. The guys who built it are now at Google. The guy DeWitt says Larry Page doesn't really support the project, which doesn't makes sense since he and Udi are working at Google.
It's interesting to hear a bunch of tech guys talk about what they want to build, but understand that there is a massive business battle going on between the search engines. So, there is this strange dance about putting out open API and open source software because it's cool or you believe in it vs. giving away the business that makes you very wealthy.
Danny Sullivan makes a killer point of if I'm searching for census data from 1982 then I should be routed to another database--like the Census database search engine.
[ Larry Page just walked into the group of 12. ]
Danny says if you have one of these database specific searches you could hit the top 500-1000 databases. So, two ways to do it.... mashup across datasources or redirect you to the best one.
Dave McClure is saying Google/Yahoo should serve up SimplyHired for jobreviews... or Spock for people... and split revenue.
Larry says search is finding content... and that Wikipedia found a better way to organize information. he seems to like the model of using humans and process and machines.
1. Hey Jason. Thanks for writing that up; I know the conversation wandered all over the place. But I suppose that is to be expected with such an interesting and diverse group of people at one table!
Just to clarify, I maintain OpenSearch (the actual specification) and cheerlead for the community independently of my day job, though the format does happen to be used by Google, and as you note, companies ranging from Amazon to Yahoo to Microsoft, etc. And I just checked: Mahalo already has some support for OpenSearch. Nice!
If there's one point I wish I had made a little louder, it would be that search, as a paradigm is universal, but it is not yet ubiquitous. My sincere hope is that search syndication protocols, such as OpenSearch, help people unlock some of the interesting unexplored corners of information, insofar as search syndication offers an simple way of using a universal pattern (send a query, get a list of results) to bring new information to new people in new places.
Posted at 10:16AM on Jun 24th 2007 by DeWitt Clinton