This post is prompted by recent Twitter discussions involving some of my co-conspirators from the 1990s, back when I was a digital libraries researcher, web caching poohbah and some-time shambrarian.
We had a particular view that Internet search would (or perhaps "should") evolve along the same lines as the Internet itself - a many faceted distributed and decentralized networked organism, held together by a common web of protocols and interchange formats. This had worked pretty well for TCP/IP, after all, so why not take the same approach for finding stuff?
Bear in mind that WAIS and Gopher were still alive and kicking at this point...
Bear in mind that WAIS and Gopher were still alive and kicking at this point...