| > You type in what you are looking for, "linen shirt under $80" or "running shoes for wet trails", and it searches across every UCP-connected merchant in real time. I expect scaling problems to crop up very quickly. It will be a scaling problem for the search engine: How do you query every merchant in real time when the number of merchants increases by 10X? And for the merchants: How do you handle the increased load when the number of queries increases by 10X or 100X? At some point, the merchant is going to look at their logs and wonder why 99% of the search queries they're receiving are for products that aren't even in their retail category. > Think of it as what RSS did for blogs, but for buying things. RSS was a nice standard for subscribing to feeds, but it and this UCP standard have fundamentally different access patterns. With RSS, you basically accessed your feeds like you accessed your webpages. But with UCP, the pitch is real-time search across an unlimited number of sites, with no indexing. If that approach were scalable, Google would have already done it. UPDATE: After reading through https://ucp.dev it looks like Google and Shopify have co-developed the protocol. So I suspect that either there's some Google magic happening under the hood, or the "searches across every UCP-connected merchant in real time" claim in the blog post is not accurately describing the underlying architecture. |