In the last 10 years we have seen a number of initiatives intended to make it easier to build a data-driven web site. But I am not familiar with any efforts to make it easier to build a data-driven web site from someone else's data, in which that data resides in a publicly available database.

[Desktop search] is very valuable for corporate workers, ... Once they understand [how to use] desktop search, [workers] can't conceive of a time when they did not have it.

Search streams - the logs in which the contents of users' search requests are recorded - are a wealth of data about what people want and how they express their desires. The owner of such a search stream possesses a powerful asset, once user attributes may be calculated to determine how they relate to the target market.

The hairy assumption is that people want to do this, and that they're going to do a good job. There is some value to me if I use it myself; if you used it and I cared what you thought, it would be substantially more valuable for me.

In most cases, mobile users are searching for spur-of-the-moment data, like a local restaurant or directions.

This is the idea of the read/write Web, ... The Web is there for you and me to annotate it, share it with our friends, share it with our business associates, to add a layer of insight and personal understanding.