About a year ago, in the summer of 2010, while visiting Microsoft, and knowing that they had been worried about the rise of Google, I asked people at Microsoft why they didn’t just make their Bing database available to the general public. Giving people direct access to the underlying database is something that Google literally cannot do, since hoarding that reverse index of the entire Web is Google’s treasure — the one thing to which they cannot give away access.<\/p>\n
But Microsoft is primarily a tools company. If they said “hey world, here’s our inverse index, use it to your heart’s content, using our software tools written in C# and managed code,” then lots of really smart people would use those tools and that database to write their own search algorithms. It would be a game changer, and Microsoft’s software would be at the very center of the new game.<\/p>\n
The highest ranking Microsoft Vice President I spoke to about this told me “That’s a very interesting idea, but it’s above my pay grade.”<\/p>\n
And so I dropped it. Maybe, I figured, something like that would be above everybody’s<\/i> pay grade. Besides, this year I’ve gotten to know some very cool people at Google, so my personal loyalties have become more diverse.<\/p>\n
When I recently visited Microsoft, one year later, I didn’t even bother to mention it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
About a year ago, in the summer of 2010, while visiting Microsoft, and knowing that they had been worried about the rise of Google, I asked people at Microsoft why they didn’t just make their Bing database available to the general public. Giving people direct access to the underlying database is something that Google literally … Continue reading “One year later”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6932"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6932"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6932\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6951,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6932\/revisions\/6951"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6932"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6932"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6932"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}