[walterbell]

It's still sooner than "never", which is the current response time for answers that Google cannot provide.

Central search indexes like Google are not going away. There are client-side metasearch interfaces that combine Google results with other sources. Those other sources can be much slower, including human responses. You would still have your synchronous sub-second response from centralized search, but there would be asynchronous results from decentralized search.

This exists today, e.g. when you post a question on HN or a messaging app, asking other humans for answers not available in public indexes. Most of the world's knowledge is not public, it's obscure and may only be of interest to specific niche audiences.

[petra]

>> Most of the world's knowledge is not public

Where is it found ?

[walterbell]

There's a long list, including private correspondence, commercial journals, proprietary databases, trade secrets, internal corporate data sets, private archives, financial trade data, classified national databases. That was before the rise of FAANG, big data, proprietary analysis / inferences / knowledge graphs derived from public data sources, metadata traffic analysis, and advertising surveillance business models.

I can't find a reference at the moment, but this topic was covered in a professional journal for historians.

[shereadsthenews]

Not sure if this is what they meant but email is thought to be larger in aggregate than the web.