What do you guys think?

[markw at mohawksoft.com (mlw)]

Nathan Meyers wrote:
> 
> On Sat, Aug 03, 2002 at 05:57:42PM -0400, mlw wrote:
> > I have written a search engine system, similar to something like Google and
> > altavista...
> >
> > Anyone have any ideas on how to package the system or to whom to sell it?
> >
> > Would I be a fool to open source all of it. (A good part of it is already open
> > sourced.)
> 
> If you're really asking questions like this, you might as well open it up
> and see what others have to contribute or how others may use it. The only
> thing that keeps it from being the next Google or AltaVista is putting
> together a company, raising a ton of money, running a large data center,
> and challenging the well-established leaders in the market. From the
> sort of questions you're asking, I suspect that's not an activity you're
> comfortable with.

Actually, I think I didn't describe it correctly. While it operates similarly
to technologies like altavista and google, it primarily a search engine for
databases. The primary interface is ODBC, but data source plugins can be
written. (This is how MPI is supported)

Say you have a huge database. While systems like Oracle support some searching
features, this adds the super quick searching that one associates with internet
search engines to your database or document directory. I do not want to get
into creating another internet search engine, that would be hugely expensive
and would require venture capital, and lets be honest, not worth the effort.

The idea would be to sell it as a product to companies with large amounts of
fairly static data to aid their data search systems.