[axel77]

Some thoughts without bigger structure:

* Well software agents are something that I read about in almost every computing scientific article, but never have seen anything close to it in reality.

* Google has managed to move itself to the center of the web. Its like the spider in the map (*pun* intended to webcrawlers). Just remember the hour or two where in europe google stopped working due to some DNS issues, People said: "The internet stopped working". Of course people are worried about a private institution to develop such a central power, and I think they are right to do so. However already the one side-based OpenSource search engines are all very meager I've seen (that are the ones you can offer for a search field of your website on your website), not even to mention about a global working and interacting search engine. The google engine does work highly distributed, so it does work in principle. I think in the early days they were some hundret PCs or so, absolutely no specialised high tech hardware. IMHO its up to the OpenSource community to develop distributed searching technique that can live without central control servers like google.

* This has however nothing to do about offering the cache version or not. Google would be pretty much in the same positoin without offering you a cache version. HOWEVER, they need to download and store your data to be able to index it. Of course you can turn this of by robots.txt, but who would find your site then? Its an egg and chicken problem.

* Today I thought about a funny analogy people complaining about cache version when they don't set the non-cache attribute in HTML pages. Its like standing on a train station (in britain) and singing for your girl friend a song. Then go over to the station control and demand they hand you out their survilance videos, because they fraud your copyright.

* One can clearly see the problem Google has. It has a strong development team, I'd say one of the best in the world, I must say everything I see from google on the technical site is pretty well developed, elegant and often pretty innovative. They started with a search engine. And this one is done, there is hardly something you can do to the search engine anymore, but they don't fire their development team, they continue to try to come up with new ideas what they can do... some successfull, some not.

* IMHO hybrid-technology between web and the desktop is the future. That is either the Javascript/HTML as an all purpose application platform. That was google is after. They aren't the only ones, Microsoft Silverlight and Adobe Air are other products that target the same core idea. It will be interesting who will win out over this in the long run. The Idea to either be able to use an application from the web, requiring you no installation is a strong one, when combined with the ability to download and install it as application when you decide so. In the second version working offline, guaranteeing your more privacy and being able to interact with your desktop better (clipboard access, file drag/drop and so on). However the developer has only to code it once. At the same time except microsoft Silberlight the Javascript/HTML / or Adobe Air take application programming to a real seperated layer, running quickly and easly and independent from, on every platform something coding always was about since C, then Object-Pascal, then java, but never really worked out so far. Google Chrome is as far as I see not a new technique to capture your private data, but as a platform for this desktop enhanced HTMLish applicatoins, which google (and I) consider future application will be, and this will be with or without google. However they again try to secure them a central position... I don't know I am not too fond of this, but I like google by a** more than Microsoft (and e.g. Microsoft silverlight) by the face, also this Adobe Flash /Air /Actionscript things, not really my tonic, but can't say exactly why... Its just all not so "elegantly" designed...