Philip Windley “summarizes”:http://www.windley.com/archives/2005/11/learning_from_t.shtml and “links”:http://www.acmqueue.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=337 to an article by Adam Bosworth recently published in ACM Queue.

His summary is that today’s databases violate almost every lesson we’ve learned from the web:

• The don’t easily support simple relaxed text formats and protocols.
• They don’t enable people to harness Moore’s law in parallel.
• They don’t optimize caching when it is OK to be stale.
• The don’t let schemas evolve for a set of items using a bottom-up consensus/tipping point.
• The don’t handle flexible graphs (or trees) well.
• They haven’t made their queries simple and flexible.
  

Meanwhile, Software Voices speculates that Bosworth “revealed the real Googlebase at the MySQL conference”:http://www.softwarevoices.com/archives/17-Did-Adam-Bosworth-reveal-the-real-Googlebase-at-the-MySQL-Users-Conference.html . In essence, the existing Googlebase represents an experiment in semi-structured data, but would become part of a larger cloud of federated databases, aided by improved support for distributed, semistructured queries in databases like MySQL.

What he doesn’t discuss are the lessons the web and Google haven’t learned about complex economies.

There are hard technical questions to creating a federated semistructured, but more importantly there are hard economic and user experience issues. John Battelle describes “the experience of one database provider in working with Google”:http://battellemedia.com/archives/001971.php :

When Google comes calling asking for your entire database, one might reasonably wonder what the company which owns that database might get in return. In this case, and in other cases I’ve heard about, the answer was “give us your data and you’ll get lots of traffic in return.” No discussion of syndication models, or shared revenues…

The company representative decided against working with Google given such terms (or lack thereof), and I have to say I certainly understand why. This is not a freeweb company that plays in the tit-for-tat world of web search. This is a domain specific company that has built a sophisticated vertical search engine which is difficult to replicate.

Google’s weakness may be that they are unable to apply the same acumen to next generation business models that they are to the technical issues.