See, the really neat thing about the 'net is it *removes* the geographical locality as a barrier.

People have interests, very specific interests. The number of people interested in following alt.barney.die.die.die are geographically dispersed, but the Internet brings them together in a virtual community.

Search engines, as primitive as they are now, make it much easier to find whatever specific item you're looking for, and odds are overwhelming that it's not on your neighbors server.

So perhaps what we need is a way for search engines to determine what's "close" - geographically, politically, or speed-wise. This isn't particularly easy to do, but if it was implemented and only worked, say, 15% of the time, it'd still make things look that much faster. Idea: what about a search engine that understands a BGP table? I'm thinking that something like Hotbot, which returns search results with several places to find the same page, goes through a process like this: 1) perform the query. 2) if your query returns multiple places to get the same page a) look at the AS_PATH for the querying IP address b) look at the AS_PATHs for the found pages c) Determine and return the "closest" one - perhaps the one whose AS_PATH is most like that of the querying host. This is a bit rough (off the top of my head, first thing in the morning), but you could do a bunch with it. Search engines, for example, that optimize for search speed vs. retrieval speed, come to mind. Anybody out there have any spare venture capital? :) eric

--- David Miller