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The late-1990s early-20-oughts search engine "Northern Light" was exactly that (old screenshot image link ironically found on via Bing). It did just what you describe: "search providers (even paid *gasp*) who specialize in certain areas such as history, science, technology, news, etc", bundled into a singly search interface. There was both general purpose search that was free, and it also pulled in and offered premium results from topic-specialty paid providers. You could choose to search the "World Wide Web", or "Special Collections" (the paid part). Or "All Sources" to pull in both. If you had a paid account, you could see more than the excerpt on the "Special Collections" results, and choose which sources to use.

It was the dawn of the Dot-Com 1.0 bubble. Northern Light was our last best hope for that consolidated search. It failed.

At one point, during the Altavista dying-but-not-dead period, while Google was still a total newcomer, it was getting a lot of traction. But it got flanked by Google pretty quickly and sunk. It's now entirely a paid, sold for internal client companies' use, very different product with no public search engine at all. Product called "SinglePoint" and loaded with buzzword bingo in its description.

Something big and mysterious is rising from a floating barge at the end of Treasure Island, a former Navy base in the middle of San Francisco Bay. And Google's fingerprints are all over it,'

It's hardly a secret guys. They were granted a patent on sea-based data centers... in 2009. They want to build a sea-water based data center, and given the mild seasons of California and abundance of internet peering points, this is the logical place to start.

The thing is, sea water isn't exactly computer-friendly... so they probably aren't going to get it on the first go. But the water a hundred feet down in the ocean is actually pretty cool. This makes sense... it all comes down to materials selection. Salt water is highly corrosive and they'll need something that can handle hoovering up large jelly fish and such without dying.

All in all, an interesting, and definately not very secret, project.

Any of those companies could have taken the concept of Facebook and implemented their own, but they would have remained playing catch-up with features in Facebook (as it moved from a college-centric system to a more generalised social media platform, as the API was released, etc.)

I would also point out that Facebook patent filings appear to have first been done in 2006 ( http://www.seobythesea.com/2010/01/facebook-patent-filings/ ), two years later.

As it stands, it took Google 7 years to get its own Facebook-clone out, and that's doing decidedly mixedly so far. I don't recall patents being amongst G+'s issues, though...

About 40% down the page, you'll see "(e.g., facebook.com/impression.php)", as well as some sample code with a Facebook URL in it, and another reference to a Facebook URL. I think it'd be extremely unusual for one company to use a different companies URL's in their examples in papers. Although I suppose it's possible. Also, I found out at http://seobythesea.com/2011/09/facebook-patent-application-target-ads/ , that this patent is assigned to Facebook in the USPTO assignment database.

This guy's pretty sure: While the patent doesn't say on its face that it belongs to Facebook, it is listed in the USPTO assignment database as being assigned to Facebook.

Sure, that's why Google patented 'Seeing With Your Hand', 'Electronic Shipping Notifications' .Blocking advertising / Censorship of "Annoying" Content, and 'Systems and Methods for Enticing Users to Access a Web Site', not to mention many dozens of others - because they don't want to be involved with them.

No. Speculation on Google's process based on a patent filing.

I seem to recall an article that was more than speculation, but I couldn't find it while searching. The 2003 entry for the Google books history also points toward it being a non-destructive process.

Exactly. A lot of people bash up Yahoo, but they seem to be doing a fair job maintaining their status as the highest traffic website. Granted that their user base is not exactly the most elite on the web, but the company as a whole is giving pretty good (if not excellent) services to its users. And the highlight of this has been its acquisitions. Like flickr and del.icio.us (which they intelligently kept separate from Yahoo MyWeb 2.0). Google is going great guns, but for me Yahoo is the player to beat to be no.1 in the web race. There's a useful list of Yahoo acquisitions here.