What’s Next for Google, By Charles H. Ferguson, January 2005
Opines that Google needs to get folks locked into proprietary but open APIs ASAP before Microsoft squishes them.
I'm not sure that the analysis that such a behavior would have saved Netscape makes sense. While one could imagine that Netscape could have implemented things like Nielson's Fat Links or Typed Links as "proprietary" it'd be relatively easy for another browser team to reverse engineer that functionality. MS had the deep linkage into the OS as leverage, as a way to make proprietary APIs. And don't Windows users regret that, when malware creeps into their system.
Given my doubts in paragraph three, i continue reading with bemused reflection on what proprietary "search standards" would look like -- particularly standards that would lock OUT the other organization. Is the expectation that content providers would use the "search standards"? I'd deliver data in any "standard" to any search engines with reasonable share. Or is it a proprietary search syntax? Not sure how that'd lock any other search company out unless the syntax was so patentable as to be considered unusable by the many searchers trained by Google. Or a proprietary XML format for transmitting search results to non-browser applications? What's new with that?
I'll admit, i probably lack imagination. A Google adapted FireFox that uses your surfing history to reorder Google results seems like the win -- search site plus browser -- but i believe way more than a few folks have speculated on that. That's not so much a proprietary API as a proprietary application, though, requiring closed code and enough clickwrapping to beat back any reverse engineering attempts -- and is there enough?
Thanks to MGP & DayPopTop40