Chapter 14

Abstract

Search Computing aims at opening the Web to a new class of search applications, by offering enhanced expressive and computational power. The success of Search Computing, as of any technical advance, will be measured by its impact upon the search industry and market, and this in turn will be highly influenced by reactions of Web users and developers. It is too early to anticipate such reactions - as the technology is still "under construction" - but this chapter attempts a first identification of the possible future players in the development of Search Computing applications, by grossly identifying the roles of "data source publishers" and of "application developers", and by discussing how classical advertising-based models may support the new applications. This chapter also describes the high-level design of the prototyping environment that is currently under development and how the design will support the deployment upon high performance architectures. Finally, we describe advertising as the prevalent business model of the search engines industry, and briefly discuss the options for the evolution of such model in the context of Search Computing.