On Fri, 12 Mar 2010 12:07:03 am Alan Meyer wrote: > Steven D'Aprano <st...@pearwood.info> wrote: > ... > > > You think that search engine software is hard? It's not hard. Yahoo > > has one, Microsoft has one, Alta Vista had one, Ask Jeeves had one, > > search engines where everywhere, and there still exist a couple of > > dozen. In 2008 alone, TEN new search engines were launched to the > > public. Google's competitive advantage isn't their software, but > > their data, their market share, and name recognition. > > I couldn't let that pass. Having written several search engines > myself I have to say that building search engines is VERY hard.
And yet there have been hundreds of commercial search engines. You yourself have written "several", although I don't know if they were commercial. There were ten new search engines launched in 2008 and another four last year. Wikipedia lists 57 web search engines launched since 1993. Of course some of these will have been primitive, and many have failed because the technology was not good enough, but you'd be surprised how many still exist and are successful (e.g. Northern Lights, launched in 1997, discontinued their public search engine but still successfully sell an enterprise search engine). Wikipedia's list of search engines shows well over 200 search engines, and I stopped counting when I reached the Desktop-search engines. "Search engine" covers far more than just Google, Baidu and Yahoo. You do a good of listing all the practical difficulties that need to be solved before you can create a good search engine. Of course there are differences in scaling up from the "Find Files" command on your desktop to (say) doing image recognition search like TinEye, or natural language semantic searches like Wolfram Alpha, or even mere key word searching, and I'm sorry to have given you the impression I underestimate the challenges in scaling up to terrabytes and petabytes of data. I didn't mean to suggest that it was something you could knock over over a weekend in PHP! But the fact of the matter is that there have been hundreds of search engines launched in the last two decades: one per month wouldn't be far off. Any company with a few million to spend could probably challenge Google. They'll almost certainly fail, but not because their search engine technology was lacking: even Microsoft, with their HUGE advantages, have been unable to do more than nudge Google's market share down a percentage point or two, and nobody thinks it is because Bing doesn't return good results. -- Steven D'Aprano _______________________________________________ Pan-users mailing list Pan-users@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/pan-users
