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Re: Google as Big Brother

• To: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>
• Subject: Re: Google as Big Brother
• From: Paul Prescod <paul@p...>
• Date: Wed, 19 Feb 2003 13:52:40 -0800
• Cc: xml-dev@l...
• In-reply-to: <r01050400-1023-AA7207D4444811D78AAD0003937A08C2@[192.168.124.11]>
• References: <r01050400-1023-AA7207D4444811D78AAD0003937A08C2@[192.168.124.11]>
• User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.3a) Gecko/20021212

Simon St.Laurent wrote:
> paul@p... (Paul Prescod) writes:
> 
>>In the context of Web Services, the two dominant 
>>models are decentralized indexes (Google and Yahoo) or centralized 
>>repositories (UDDI registry-in-the-sky).
> 
> 
> I think I'm missing something here.  
> 
> Google feels useful to me because it has created a centralized
> repository of information that's normally distributed (scattered) about.
> While Google goes out and collects the information (while UDDI has a
> registration process), I still see it as a centralizing force.  Google
> just kind of pulls the information in while UDDI (like Yahoo of old)
> requires that users push it in.
> 
> It's entirely possible that I've missed your point, however.  

There are a few issues.

First, Google is not mandated as central by any standards body. There is 
no "uddi.org" that decides who gets into the search engine game or not.

Second, Google has no information about a site (except synthesized data 
like PageRank) that you cannot get from the site itself. Therefore, once 
Google does the introduction, you do not ever need to use them again. If 
you want to tell Google about your site you give it a URI and not much 
else.

Third, as a consequence of the second point, Google has no information 
(except ... PageRank) about a site that is not equally available to 
AltaVista and Inktomi. This means that it is theoretically easy to build 
a repository that has exactly the same information as Google (but much 
harder to build a search engine over that repository!).

Fourth, Google's way of addressing resources is by their URIs. That 
means that once I get an introduction through Google, I can introduce a 
third party without going through Google again. UDDI uses UUIDs and 
those UUIDs are specific to some particular registry.

  Paul Prescod

• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: Google as Big Brother
    • From: "Chiusano Joseph" <chiusano_joseph@b...>
  • Re: Google as Big Brother
    • From: "Alaric B. Snell" <alaric@a...>
  • Re: Google as Big Brother
    • From: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>

• References:
  • Re: Google as Big Brother
    • From: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>

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