The World Is The Index

Para pensar, by John Batelle 

"What is search? Well, search is a database of everything that is worth knowing about on the web. It's made by a crawler that pings web real estate and creates an index/database of what it finds. It's served up as an application through a user interface that takes your queries and matches them to the best results in that database.

Simple, but that simplicity largely fueled Web 2 as we know it.

Now consider a new dataset for search, the dataset owned by DigitalGlobe. The crawlers are DigitalGlobe's satellites. The real estate being pinged is every square foot of the earth. As with the web, some parts of the world are worth pinging more often than other parts. (We don't hit Greenland very often, Dr. Scott told me. But during the Olympics, the company took a picture of Beijing *once every 8 seconds.* Imagine if this technology was around during Tiananmen). The data that satellite crawler captures is stored in a vast index/database. And that index is served up as a product through a UI, though in DigitalGlobe's case, the UI is not yet scaled to a mass consumer use like Google."

íntegra

LM