How long until "Internet search" is decentralized?
I came across this blog. Their problem?
Many eBay UK shop (store) owners are complaining their traffic is massively down in the last 6-8 weeks since Googles Jagger 1/2/3 update apparently removed millions of eBay items from the SERPS.
It could be for real or just a hoax. But it brings up a subject rarely discussed: As search engines become more dominant and are able to influence economy, politics and culture in a straight-forward way depending on their ability or interests, people will want a share of this power. This is not something new, it has happened over and over throughout history. People (probably Internet users and merchants in this case) will want to "democratize search".
A year ago, I brought up the idea of a distributed query system. This is not an original idea -people have long talked about distributed search engines. I'm pretty sure some of the suggested models are much better designed than what I suggested -even though Amazon's OpenSearch is amazingly close to this model.
What's important is the vision of a search system that will allow every publisher (as small as an unknown blog or as big as Google, Amazon or Ebay) to contribute to it, and users to decide their "search neighborhood" (in a way this is what Yahoo! is trying to do with Yahoo! Mindset and Y!Q). It seems that Adam Bosworth has something like this in his mind too.
I really don't know that the most suitable implementation of this "thing" could be. But I'm sure that as we moved from directory services (the original Yahoo!, and DMOZ) to search engines, we will be soon moving to a new, "decentralized" or "democratized" search engine model.