So there's no lock-in happening here. As soon as we release Frontier 6, anyone will be able to operate a distributed search engine. We see the search engine as being the key idea to create a unified web presence for all information about Frontier, regardless of what website it's stored on. This is what I meant when I said on the Frontier-users list that there may be pieces of the puzzle that weren't evident at the time. It still may not be evident to many people.
New ideas take a while to settle in and become ordinary.
At one time or another every part of Frontier was this new and hard to understand. That's the way it goes. But only if you don't use the search engine. We're providing two primary interfaces for content on our website, time and searching. If you remember you once saw something on one of our sites, now you can find it.