I have a lot of respect both for the artists that made this and for the scientists pushing boundaries forward in a way that was almost inconceivable a decade ago.<p>That said, if anyone here works at JPL, I can't be (but feel like I am) the only person wondering what the hell happened to memex-explorer.<p>We are talking about the obvious change in search. If you are not familiar, the memex-explorer project seemed to be the first company that realized an open source tailored version of google can ve assembled out of Apache open source projects. You define a crawl structure and save your data into silos you control while using your own parameters to search.<p>However, despite what appeared to be solid progress and the initial buzz of articles labeling the google killer- and to be clear this tech will evolve in 1-2 years and diminish googles adverts, the project has a simple commit that says:<p>Not actively maintained.<p>Why did JPL stop working on this? Darpa brought the world TOR so they do deliver projects that could potentially be problematic to the gov't, so I don't want to jump into conspiracy theories, but what the fuck.<p>Tl;dr super obvious hadoop, solr, dns and elastic search is pretty much google and the browser can never be decoupled from search. JPL got close to giving the user all 3 in unity under their control and then project was abandoned. I'll say it i guess, having 50% concentration in browsing and the only proper centralization of most peoples thoughts is a big loss to google, and if I am being honest I think the govt.