|
For quite some time now I've been doing all my surfing trough Google. There are several sites and weblogs I regulary read that I reach looking for the author's name on google and hitting the "I feel lucky" button (yes, I know about bookmarks, but I'm lazy, ok?).
This also means that from my point of view google a "web index" and consequantly, if a web site is not listed on google, most probably I would never reach it.
Now, we all use google only as a way to jump to a specific site and we seldom use the google cache (I use it when a site I'm looking for is unreachable), but still, the cache is there. This means that google can provide us not only the index but also the very content we're searching.
One of the problems with Google's cache is that also if it's updated very frequently, even daily for news sites and blogs, but often "daily" is not enough. As far as news are concerned, I guess that the google news service has solved this problem, meaning that news sites are cached quite frequently.
Blogs and other sites could be updated in google's cache very easily using a system similar to weblogs.com. If google could scan the weblogs.com xml index, it would probably be more efficient and "time-to-cache" could be significantly lowered.
Google could also open their own notification system. How many seconds do you think that would pass between such a service announcement and having it implemented in all major weblogging and content management tools?
If such a system would exisit, making google's cache relly up-to-date, we would not need to connect to the web anymore, accessing google would be enough.
It's not that I linke any solution where intermediaries are added between me and the content I want to reach, but there are cases where accessing a cached version of some contents could be helpful, such as with very small mobile devices or other devices were estabilshing a connection to one host might prove easier than being able to connect to any host.
Another thing that google could do with their cache would be providing rss feeds for a lot of sites. We did an Rss parser, and there are others around the web. If we managed to create something usable, I'm sure that google's engineers could do a much better job.
Google is sitting an updated version of the whole web backup, what other applications could they bring to us based on the wealth they have?
| 
