[boyter]

I would imagine there would be a few problems with that which might be insurmountable.

The first being speed. People complain about DDG's speed already. Relying on a host of external searches would only cause more issues. Especially if as Google reports that a huge amount of queries are unique.

Another would be ranking. Who determines what is the most relevant result to a query? While you have multiple sources knowing which one to go to has to be determined somewhere. If you hand it over to the peers, they can game the system by insisting they are the most relevant. If you leave it to the server what incentive do the peers have to participate? If you use an open algorithm which people use whats to stop people from gaming the system?

I don't think there is an easy answer to the search game. You either need to build on others systems to have something compelling, or have millions (if not billions) of cash to have enough runway to build/improve your own system, improve it to the point its worth using and then turn a profit.

I don't even think its the complexity of the problem that stops the second. It's bandwidth and disk storage. My personal prediction is once we get disk's up-to a size where you can store a sizable chunk of the web, coupled with enough bandwidth to crawl it in a reasonable time you will see more innovation in the search space as the barrier to entry will be lowered.

[mmahemoff]

"Especially if as Google reports that a huge amount of queries are unique."

Google reports 20-25% of queries are unique, way more than I think most of us would expect. http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/udi_manber_search_is_a_...

We can probably assume it's not evenly distributed across people. Some people would probably always get cached queries, while others would need fresh results at least half the time.

[boyter]

That's probably true. I imagine it would also be true to say anyone using a new search engine would be those throwing unique queries at it most of the time too.

With that in mind, and with the tech world generally driving adoption of players in the search space I can't see the approach working. Nobody would switch when the queries are massively slower, even if they were 99% accurate.