I have spent enough time struggling with IBM's Net Search Extender, its normalization options, and the particular precedence the umlaut receives (highlighting its German development) that i find myself giggling and guffawing at the Wikipedia article on "Heavy metal umlaut."
I'm also a fan of Queensrÿche, and cheated by cutting and pasting the ÿ (but, lo, there it is on the character palette).
Thanks to DayPopTop 40
This reflects our experience in building the RedLightGreen DB2 database and our current work in a similar but far more comprehensive Union Catalog database.
Dave Richards, chief technology officer for The Research Libraries Group Inc., of Mountain View, Calif., said his organization uses XML to store bibliographic data, which requires a great deal of auxiliary table construction to search and access records. Richards said the native XML support improvements for DB2 will allow digital records to be stored in a preparsed form, enabling streamlined and more efficient searches. "We wanted to be able to support queries that just were based on information in the e-records that had not been indexed. The way we have to do that at the moment is not terribly efficient," said Richards. "[Native XML support] is going to enable us to store things more compactly and access them easier ... and make it easy for us to be able to ingest and then export data in XML when we're able to migrate to that version of DB2." Richards said RLG is implementing a 1.5TB database featuring 140 million records representing books, serials, maps, films and music scores.
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