The company has a private network. The happy medium is to have people doing indexing on each one of the local Web servers and to build meta-indexes. When you try to do the search, the meta-search engine will first figure out which search engines around the company should get the request. It will send the search query to each search engine. And finally it will assemble the answers and give them to you in a digestible form.
Few people realize how important search engines have become to any sense of order on the Web.
Today they're all but indispensable. That's why solving these problems is critical to the future of the Web. Talk back to Simson Garfinkel in his column's Threads . Illustration by Dave Plunkert Join the HotWired Network, it's free . Members log in .