We at http://www.fi/ have a good coverage of the www-resources of
Finland. You are right, we are clearly not willing to share our
information base with other search engines in Finland (there is
another one). On the other hand, it might be possible to share the
database with some or all of the international search engines as a
promotion. We would not lose any markets here in finland, 'cause
always our site would be the fastest way for Finnish customers to
perform searching.
> What do you see as the advantage to sharing information?
> It is offhand not clear to me that much is to be gained
> by it. For instance, given that each robot-running
> organization usually has their own way of processing
> the resources they find, then they have to go out and
> retrieve the resources in any event. Thus, not much
> may be saved by sharing information....
If the two co-operating parties agree of common set of
information to stre about each individual page, both could
modify their robots to comply with this. Possibly even
just a compressed .tar.gz archive of the pages could do.
Anyway it saves bandwidth in international connections
and annoys the servers less.
I do not believe that our current database would suit anybody elses
needs, but maybe the next time we collect all the pages we could fetch
all the information necessary to someone else too.
Feel free to contact me at Jaakko.Hyvatti@www.fi if you are
interested. We cover almost all of Finland.