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08/23/2004: "replacing Google"

Here is an interesting perspective on Internet search engines. It gives one pause for thought.

I listened to Jim Gray on IT Conversations last night. While overall the talked seemed to drag, I was struck by the fact that he kept talking about Google, SETI @ Home and (the old) Napster, but didn't connect that it would be possible, with a bit of open source software, to construct a replacement for Google that is both distributed, and larger than Google could ever be.

Consider what would happen if Microsoft were to couple their search research (no pun intended) with a distributed p2p platform hosted on Windows. Through its operating system monopoly, Microsoft controls approximately 90% of the machines attached to the Internet. What would happen if they managed to configure those 50 million PCs into a distributed storage and computation service, used for their own search engine?

Now what if the service was only available to users of Internet Explorer?

AOL could pull off a similar stunt, though at a somewhat reduced scale, since they only have about 20 million subscribers. They are in a bit more 'control' of how often people update the AOL software, compared to Microsoft's ability to field-update operating system platforms.

Still, lets assume the Microsoft or AOL managed to usurp only 5 million desktops, and that the average CPU on these is a 1GHz Pentium 3 equivalent with 256MB of RAM and 20GB of HDD.

Now reduce those numbers to 1 million units to account for redudnancy, etc.

Its still a lot of CPU power. And its free.

Will Google be replaced by something Napster-like? Not if what it offers people is free search, they already have that. But what if Microsoft *paid* you $100/year for the idle cycles in your desktop?

They could certainly afford this, its only $500M/year. This is 1% of Microsoft's cash reserves. But they don't even need to spend money to make it happen. They could give away software. Upgrade to XP for free if you'll run our search software on your machine.

They could set minimum standards for qualifying hardware this way. You'ld need to turn over a 2GHz P4 equivalent, and furnish them with 10GB of your disk space and their own 256MB of ram, and some always-on broadband connection. Sure, they end up giving away 100M XP "Search edition" licenses, but these could just be "XP Home Edition" crippled in some way. Most of the people who will upgrade to XP have. Microsoft gets to count incremental units ("more than 100M additional licenses of XP") and build a "search computer" larger than Google can afford.