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On 15 May 2014 10:57, Martijn Grooten <martijn@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > I disagree. Google did a lot of work to create their search engine, > which doesn't just collect the content of the web, but indexes it in a > useful way. And they're pretty damn good at it. No; in relative terms, they did no work at all to create their search engine. The effort involved is virtually zero compared to the returns, which, I reiterate, are all a (relatively, in context) negligible transformation of, or rather a trivial function taking as its only input, other people's work. PageRank is smart, it's good, it's fast, it scales, it's better than anyone else's... and it's vanishingly cheap to develop and maintain, in context. It's also derivative; basically a map-reduce. They learnt map-reduce in class at Stanford one day and implemented it for web search the next. Nice work, but the rewards are not proportionate to the effort or risk involved; nothing like. The network on which they perch was created by others; the Web was created by others; the algorithm was invented by others; the FLOSS platforms they run on were invented, popularized and maintained by other people; the data and linking they index is created by others; and all of this they get for free. They deserve something; they got everything. What they were really smart and industry-leading about was the minimalist look and feel of the landing page and the results pages. They've always been very strict about those, and they chose a real winning formula there. What really distinguishes them from most geeks is that they *got* the Jobs message: the interface *is* the application. > Which is also why I think Google can't just hold up their hands and say: > we didn't create this data, we merely write algorithms that parse it. > (Which is what I think you're alluding to as well.) Right (and right). -- Phil Hudson http://hudson-it.no-ip.biz @UWascalWabbit PGP/GnuPG ID: 0x887DCA63 -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq