Puzzlepieces – April, 2006

Google Data APIs Protocol - interesting move from Google. I (and others) have thought for a while that combining OpenSearch’s read capabilities with the Atom Publishing Protocol’s write capabilities would create a very powerful API, and that’s roughly what Google is doing here.

It’s great to see the OpenSearch support (a bit - they’re using startIndex, totalResults and itemsPerPage), but I’d like to see them using it more. Some of what they’re doing is contrary to how OpenSearch works (that’s not a problem per-say), as they’re using predefined query names such as q and max-results (and a folder for categories) rather that allowing people to use whichever they want and then specify them in an OpenSearch Description file.

In that same vein, it would be nice to see them make use of autodiscovery, as Atom, RSS, OpenSearch, and others do. Upon first inspection I would say these autodiscovered documents could be OpenSearch Descriptions, but I may be wrong about that.

One interesting thing to note is that they mention how startIndex is 1-based (which is true), and then display an example with a value of “0″. Sounds like DeWitt is right, it does need to handle 0-based numbers too; even Google is making that mistake.

DeWitt brings up some other good points as well.

Via Niall.

Update: Joe Gregorio weighs in

Update 2: Marc Canter (one of my favourite bloggers) finds this linkworthy although I’m always amazed at the spellings my name gets.

me, upon learning about GoTo (1998 or perhaps 1999):
This site won’t last five minutes. If anybody can game the system (pay their way to the top), the results will suck and nobody will use it.
reality:
GoTo became Overture, bought AllTheWeb and AltaVista, and got bought by Yahoo for $1.63 billion. Their business model was copied by Google, where it accounts for the vast majority of their enormous and growing revenue, and completely turned the company around. I was wrong because I hadn’t thought of the scale. When one particular company knows they can pay to get higher, the results will suck, but when every other company in the industry knows that too, economics will sort things out; it’s in their best interests to be relevant to searchers.

me, upon learning about PageRank (2000 or 2001 probably):
That’s terrible! If they only show popular sites, those sites will just get more popular and it won’t be long before no new sites ever get found by anyone.
reality:
I was partially correct, however the case of the popular becoming more popular was already occurring anyway, as people followed links. Also PageRank is just part of Google’s algorithm, which also incorporates timeliness, and it is definitely possible for newcomers to get in.

me, upon learning of Technorati (2002)
um… what’s the point? It just shows backlinks, it doesn’t even have any search, nor a “what’s popular” listing (like Daypop for instance).
reality:
One thing I forgot: people love knowing who links to them. Today Technorati does have search (of several sorts), and a whole bunch of “what’s popular” listings. They’re also the most successful (at least in terms of popularity) blog search engine, very innovative, and have spearheaded the wonderful microformats initiative, largely thanks to Tantek.

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