Beyond search results, a significant amount of googles value is in its “apps”, or whatever they call the functional snippets like calculator, translator etc. built into the engine.

I wonder if it would make sense to have cross platform plug-ins, so that all of these interesting nascent search engine efforts could automatically benefit from new plug-ins and an ecosystem could start to develop.

It’s great to have an alternative but obviously it’s such a huge effort the efficiency of development will be important.