I'd love to see some of the search engines who are catering to more sophisticated searchers just tell us the BOSS, or whatever cache they are licensing, API functions and then indicate which ones they are supporting.<p>For all we know several of these search engines are all accessing the same cache and they are simply choosing to focus on different options that the cache license offers and making different arbitrary CGI decisions like slash bang whatever.<p>It makes sense to hide details behind "magic" if the users are unsophisticated. But it seems like there's really little reason to do this for sophisticated searchers.<p>Maybe there is and I am just not seeing the competitive advantage or value addition.<p>At the same time, I feel like we may have different search engines all using the same licensed cache source and trying to differentiate themselves on multiple implementations of idiosyncratic ways to access the same cache API, instead of focusing on more basic factors, like speed and privacy.<p>Maybe searchers just want to access that licensed cache which is too expensive for them to subscribe to. Maybe it's not so important all the fancy things one can do with CGI. Maybe the fancy things are important. Maybe they just crave "features". I don't know.<p>But my guess is the BOSS cache is probably not that hard to work with and that most searchers could get their searches done easily enough, in simple fashion, if they had their own BOSS subscriptions, without the need for lots of customisations (which equate to the exotic features of these search engines).<p>Just my thoughts.