In the early 90s there were various nascent systems for essentially public database interfaces for searching
The idea was that instead of a centralized search, people could have fat clients that individually query these apis and then aggregate the results on the client machine.
Essentially every query would be a what/where or what/who pair. This would focus the results
I really think we need to reboot those core ideas.
We have a manual version today. There's quite a few large databases that the crawlers don't get.
The one place for everything approach has the same fundamental problems that were pointed out 30 years ago, they've just become obvious to everybody now.
The idea was that instead of a centralized search, people could have fat clients that individually query these apis and then aggregate the results on the client machine.
Essentially every query would be a what/where or what/who pair. This would focus the results
I really think we need to reboot those core ideas.
We have a manual version today. There's quite a few large databases that the crawlers don't get.
The one place for everything approach has the same fundamental problems that were pointed out 30 years ago, they've just become obvious to everybody now.