Mind Mash

John Battelle’s post on open search stimulated me to distill some of my thoughts about open search. Here’s what I wrote in a comment to his post:

The later that a third party component can make changes in the process of serving search results, the less leverage they have and therefore less of a business opportunity.

What will really change the game is to allow third parties to add features to the index, and access those features during search. Ensuring that different contributions to the search engine did not fight each other would be a challenge which would need to be addressed upfront, but the opportunities would be amazing.

Search is opening up in a fascinating way. Powerset (now part of Microsoft) is part of that moving beyond the five blue links to richer forms of presentation, and beyond keywords to a much richer index.