Raw

Search engine companies / people, IMHO, tend to be biased towards seeing access to information through their (search engine) parsers and algorithms. In other words, they don't tend to be regonize that the ineraction of peer-to-peer data sharing / exchange is often more important than the interaction of extracting data out of a document.



For example, if I want to know the name of the town you live in:



-I could use a full-text search engine to try to find some reference to words like "town" or "city, and page through results until I find something, or



-I could use a microformat search engine to see if it has indexed an hCard for someone with the same name as you and correctly extracted the properties I am interested in, or



-I could just "ask you" for the name of the town you live in.



The "ask you" interaction can, of course, be automated (e.g., always check to see if anyone on my IM buddy list has a new address, and if so, update my address book and add an event in my calendar).



@en