Archiving Universal Search Engines

[Andrew Pam <xanni@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Found on Slashdot at:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/04/24/1019216&mode=thread

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Archiving Universal Search Engines (Score:2)
by Baldrson (jabowery@xxxxxxxxxx) on 02:43 AM -- Wednesday April 26 2000 EAD (#68)
(User Info) http://www.geocities.com/jim_bowery
"He who controls the past controls the future." -- George Orwell

The main problem with history editing is disappearing history. This has
been true from www.deja.com's bit-decaying Usenet archive all the way
back to the Library at Alexandria.

The only real way to address the disappearing history problem is a shift
away from:

1. Centralized archives with specialized search engines AND 
2. A variety of universal web search engines that don't archive to a
   variety of universal web search engines that archive.

Storage capacity just isn't expensive enough to justify anything but
redundantly archived versions of everything ever published on the Web
and Usenet. The indexes of such versioning archives are quite similar
to the data structures needed for compression anyway, so this is a
natural marriage.

I know the Xanadu cover story on Wired a few years ago ended by saying
"somethings are best forgotten" but then that article was written by
the kind of guys it is generally best to disobey at every opportunity.

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Share and enjoy,
		Andrew
-- 
mailto:xanni@xxxxxxxxxx                         Andrew Pam
http://www.xanadu.com.au/                       Chief Scientist, Xanadu
http://www.glasswings.com.au/                   Technology Manager, Glass Wings
http://www.sericyb.com.au/sc/                   Manager, Serious Cybernetics
P.O. Box 26, East Melbourne VIC 8002 Australia  Phone +61 0401 258 915