BTW, why is it that Google has not opened up its core search engine to third party developers so that their code can be used to bring up some of the search results by default (without requiring the user to subscribe to third party features)?
Most people have never used Google's Subscribed Links feature because it is not enabled by default.
User feedback can be used to determine which third party code to use in which contexts. Spam/unhelpful features would be detected quickly. There would be intense competition among third party developers for highly desired features.
Something like this could give you Wolfram Alpha like features among other things such as custom UIs for various searches (e.g., travel).
The Google App Engine could be used for computation. You could pay third party developers by how often their code is used in search results.
Just speaking for me personally, I'd be a fan of trying ideas like that. The potential danger would be that some code could introduce latency or other things that would make the search experience worse instead of better.
There are huge risks with this approach, but there's also a lot of potential. Search could look quite different.
It would be an ideal place to experiment with and profit from novel search ideas. For example, third party developers may experiment with query-induced flash mobs where people who just performed a similar query could collaborate in real-time to find the information they need.
Finding ways to prevent such an ecosystem from descending into absolute chaos would be a fascinating challenge.
It seems more likely that the average developer would introduce latency when searching through a database of billions of text documents than when making an application that makes a fart sound when you press a button. Just sayin'.
Most people have never used Google's Subscribed Links feature because it is not enabled by default.
User feedback can be used to determine which third party code to use in which contexts. Spam/unhelpful features would be detected quickly. There would be intense competition among third party developers for highly desired features.
Something like this could give you Wolfram Alpha like features among other things such as custom UIs for various searches (e.g., travel).
The Google App Engine could be used for computation. You could pay third party developers by how often their code is used in search results.