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If you have a local website - a directory of local businesses, county website etc. - with a google search form on it, what google could do when someone searches from this site is to look in it's index at all the domains to which this site links and give those sites a little more relevance.
In essence it would use the position of the search form to inject a little more PR and go through a couple of itterations calculating distribution across pages within a finite number of links.
I haven't looked into the practicalities of injecting a little PR to one spot in an index but I'm sure there'll be a mathematical way of doing it ;)
The result would (hopefully) be that 'local' business sites that are linked from the 'local' directory would have a fighting chance of coming top, even if the search term is something that has an enormous level of 'global' competition. And the credibility of this 'local' search box would rely on the webmasters ability to link properly to 'local' companies.
Presumably this would also work to some extent using a search box somewhere like apache.org when you're looking for explanation of apache errors or some docs for an apache module etc...
I've got loads of other ideas along this line but my post is getting too long already.. ;) Hope that it makes some sense... do people think there's a chance it would work?
Let's say (in a future scenario) that I declare the partition "F:" of my hard drive as "public". Thus, all its contents are searchable to all other Longhorn users, over the internet, regardless of whether or not it is web content (in fact, let's suppose I'm not even running a web server).
This is something that Longhorn has the potential to offer -- though the logistical and privacy issues would be a nightmare.
Then again, thinking back to twelve years ago, if someone was to describe to me then how the world of digital information sharing (i.e. the web and its search engines) would be now...
