> See, the really neat thing about the 'net is it *removes* the geographical
> locality as a barrier.
>
> Search engines, as primitive as they are now, make it much easier to find
> whatever specific item you're looking for, and odds are overwhelming that
> it's not on your neighbors server.So perhaps what we need is a way for search engines to determine what's
"close" - geographically, politically, or speed-wise. This isn't particularly
easy to do, but if it was implemented and only worked, say, 15% of the time,
it'd still make things look that much faster.Idea: what about a search engine that understands a BGP table? I'm thinking
that something like Hotbot, which returns search results with several places
to find the same page, goes through a process like this:1) perform the query.
2) if your query returns multiple places to get the same page
a) look at the AS_PATH for the querying IP address
b) look at the AS_PATHs for the found pages
c) Determine and return the "closest" one - perhaps the one
whose AS_PATH is most like that of the querying host.This is a bit rough (off the top of my head, first thing in the morning), but
you could do a bunch with it. Search engines, for example, that optimize for
search speed vs. retrieval speed, come to mind.Anybody out there have any spare venture capital?
eric
> --- David Miller
Can you say Landmark or Rondeeaux