Page History

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• The code is all open – universities may prefer to run their own (in which case you request that they sponsor to help keep the code updated)
• Service providers may decide they could host competitive search services, with their own value added in tweaks to relevance ranking, etc.
• As the price goes up, a cost benefit analysis will steer people to other options including custom Google search appliances, etc.

Technical Risks

Indexing is too slow

This could be a problem for two reasons

• Indexing consumes too many resources and is costly to support
• Updates cannot happen with sufficient frequency to satisfy local requirements or incentivize updates
  
  • People have more confidence in a system which they can control themselves by seeing corrections happen

What will contribute to slowness?

• Indexing more detail, especially detail that is more remotely connected to the individual entity being indexed
  
  • e.g., if you want to get the names of all co-authors for a researcher, not just the titles of their papers
• Doing more to align or disambiguate data at indexing time
  
  • e.g., including in the index a list of possible alternative organizations, people, journals, etc. to facilitate corrections during use
• Doing more queries, computation or analysis to improve relevance ranking
  • e.g., boosting relevance based on the number of papers or grants

Indexing interferes with performance on the site being indexed

This may become the countervailing pressure from distributed sites --

Relevance ranking proves intractably messy

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