But if you buy a tool that makes it easy to, say, shred the lettuce for a salad, you’ll get a beautiful bowl full of the base for a good salad.

You still might not know how to make a good salad.

The question in my mind isn’t whether you can put data online using Caspio; clearly you can (although saying that Javascript isn’t the only method belies the fact that most Caspio apps I’ve seen use this method). The question is to what end? Do you want to put up apps for a single story that don’t get indexed? Can news organizations accurately anticipate all the ways people might be searching for their content?

As Justin Lilly said in a comment on my original post, “If you slight the amount of work and knowledge involved in putting out a good product … you’re going to end up with a communist—’everyone gets the same thing’—style future.” Is that what we want?

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_web

See: http://oedb.org/library/college-basics/invisible-web

Experts have been trying to figure out a solution for this problem since the appearance of the first search engine. I can confidently say that Caspio is ahead of the pack.

1. The content of most databases is so generic, such as street addresses, people names, or transaction amounts that they hold no real value for search engines. Our customers make their database assets visible to search engines through an intro paragraph outside the DataPage.

2. The problem of search engines not being able to index database-driven content is not unique to Caspio or to our highly flexible and unique JavaScript deployment method. Note that search engines also ignore URL parameters, those values that are after a question mark and therefore almost all homegrown databases remain invisible to search engines. Furthermore, if an interactive search form is in front of a database, no search engine can reach it regardless of how it is created or deployed.

3. JavaScript is only one of the deployment methods Caspio provides. Domain mapping along with iFrame and link deployment models provide more diversity and choices than any home grown solution. It is up to our clients to decide how they want to configure their DataPages and what deployment model to use of the half dozen or so we make available.

4. Caspio is engineering innovative ways to provide our customers more choices. Some of these new options will be available in the fourth quarter of 2008.

5. The providers of search engines realize this as one of their shortcomings and they are looking for ways to reach more content and be able to index databases. This problem will not be a problem in a year or two.

6. As for you not being able to compare one airport to another, again, it is up to the end user to decide what type of database web app they want to build using our product. Our customer’s success depends on their ability to execute their ideas quickly. Traditional development methods are too slow, expensive, and unnecessary for most types of web applications. Caspio Bridge is designed to simplify web application creation and online data management while making them highly affordable.

Caspio is proud to be trusted by the online news media. It is an excellent product with a huge following.

Best,

David A. Milliron, Vice President
Media Services Division, Caspio, Inc.
http://www.caspio.com/media
877-820-9100 x741

My firm launched the web’s first Database-as-a-Service offering in 1999 (before Caspio) and in that time we’ve been very pleased to see our industry grow from a point where few people could see the benefit of moving the database function to the cloud to now where SaaS solutions are commonly used in the enterprise.

We found that folks who looked at our service early on could understand not having to hire a database programmer to implement their solution but still had concerns about reliability and security. We recognized these concerns upon our launch, and they remain important today.

What I dislike about these search-based data dumps is that they lack all context. It does not seem very valuable to me to look up one airport’s luggage losses, for example. I would like to compare my airport to other airports, at the very least.

The fact that a lot of media companies bought Caspio does not prove that it’s a great service.