Taking advantage of Gears

[Mark Whiting]

This may come across as a silly suggestion because I am not familiar
with its practicality, however I was wondering if there were any
consideration toward generalising this tool into search interface for
gears. Obviously the Docs data would remain up today via this approach
and furthermore the development could lead to a highly useful API
allowing others creating apps that use Gears to get into Spotlight
etc. more easily.

Again, sorry if I simply do not understand how these things work well
enough.

Mark Whiting

[Stuart Morgan]

Not silly at all; it's certainly an interesting idea. Unfortunately
though, I don't think it would really be practical. Gears provides
sites with an arbitrary relational database, so not only would I have
to reverse-engineer each Gears-enabled site's storage individually
(and hope it would never change), but there's no guarantee that it
would even have critical information like "what is the URL to access
this individual item?". So essentially for it to work, sites would
have to specially write their storage to be Precipitate-compatible,
and the user base of Precipitate is so tiny that there's little chance
sites would be interested in doing so (or even aware of the
possibility).

Thanks for bringing up the idea though; it's not something I'd
considered before.