Re: conneg, HTTPbis, and generic resources (status check)

On Sat, 5 Dec 2009, Tim Berners-Lee wrote:
> On 2009-11 -25, at 10:50, Larry Masinter wrote:
> > 
> > Presumably you mean "by Google". Whether the same is true for any 
> > other search engine is unclear, but I suppose other search engines are 
> > forced to reverse engineer Google's page ranking in the same way that 
> > browsers are forced to reverse engineer Internet Explorer.
> 
> No, they compete to make them better. There is no reason to copy 
> Google's faults. If they can find a more relevant page then more power 
> to them.

Indeed. In fact we (Google) find ourselves reverse engineering browsers 
quite a lot, but to my knowledge are not aware of cases of search engines 
reverse engineering each other. The few times search engines have 
implemented similar search-specific features (robots.txt, rel=nofollow, 
rel=canonical, sitemaps), the features were developed in conjunction with 
other search engines, not via reverse engineering.

HTH,
-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Saturday, 5 December 2009 21:56:35 UTC