I've received some comments on some of my recent posts of Google and WSIL.  Here are a few:

Umm..Google is hardly comprehensive. It misses about 90% of what goes on and, for that matter of fact, the ability to "text mine" is far different from the ability to comprehend what you extract.

Oy.  Where do I start? WS-Inspection (WSIL) is a way of querying a server for what Web Services it provides. It has some primitive linking capabilities, but basically, it is complementary to UDDI, not competitive. More importantly, you could not replace UDDI with it.

While I don't disagree with either of these points, I think they kind of miss a key fact: Good Enough is Best.  A realtively well-known essay called Lisp: Good News/Bad News/How to Win Big by Richard P. Gabriel has a section called  The Rise of Worse is Better which describes how a school of thinking - worse is better - leads to market winning products.   I like to think of it as "good enough is best." 

As techies, we're often too concerned with building the perfect solution instead of the solution that works good enough.  The fact is that google works very well and does so much right now that most people are continually amazed at it.  Does that mean that there won't be (or isn't) anything better?  Of course not.  But getting mind share for that better thing will be difficult because google already solves most of the search problems people have right now. 

As for UDDI, where do I begin?  UDDI, in trying to be all things, is nothing.  Show me the masses rushing to adopt it.  My point about WSIL and google is not that its equivalent to UDDI, but that it would solve most of the problems people have right now and do it in a way that is simple, easy to deploy, and doesn't require huge investments in infrastructure.  If UDDI comes along later, great.  But I'm not holding my breath.