When one thinks of search, one thinks of – Google, Yahoo and MSN and in that order. We know the crazy price of the Google stock. So what is their most valuable asset? If we ignore the market perception at the core of it are two things – Their Index and the PageRank algorithm. And the many seemingly adhoc heuristics that aid the PageRank algorithm to deliver better and more accurate search results.
Now the the Index is expensive to maintain and keep updated and I think has the biggest est value. So what happens when Amazon, opens its A9s search engine indexes to anyone who cares? They have taken Google’s most valuable asset and made it a have just commodity, thus making it possible for anyone to try to improvise on the search algorithms that only big players had the privilege to play with.
So what are the implications? There are many in the ever changing dynamics of on line business, but one side effect is the impact on Data Mining research. Think every School’s CS department having access to a large dataset that they can apply their algorithms and theories on. Hope it aids in accelerating research.
Being so close to academia, why didn’t Google think of this? Probably the same reason Yahoo and MSN did not think of it.