Stephen Downes

So could we ever have a real-time web search index? That is, a search index that is refresehed every day, so that when we search, it's right up to date? We could - but the answer isn't a massive centralized service like Google, it's a massively distributed service like Grub. We have had distributed services on this scale before - SETI@home was about as large as Grub would need to be to update the index daily. So maybe there's something to it.