Comments on: What is the "upstart, Linux-like cooperative" search engine mentioned in this Reuters about Google?

Question: What is the "upstart, Linux-like cooperative" search engine mentioned in this Reuters about Google?

tranquileye — Tue, 23 Mar 2004 09:00:24 -0800

What is the "upstart, Linux-like cooperative" search engine mentioned in this Reuters about Google?

By: DevilsAdvocate

DevilsAdvocate — Tue, 23 Mar 2004 09:14:40 -0800

Did you read the whole article?

Another potential threat could come from Nutch, a group of programmers who are developing an open source search engine.

By making the underlying algorithms and code available for all to see, Nutch's co-founder Michael Cafarella says the pace of search innovation could be improved dramatically.

By: jbrjake

jbrjake — Tue, 23 Mar 2004 09:15:28 -0800

Well, according to the article you linked, it's called Nutch.

A quick googling led me to its website, creatively entitled www.nutch.org.

Nutch is a nascent effort to implement an open-source web search engine.

Web search is a basic requirement for internet navigation, yet the number of web search engines is decreasing. Today's oligopoly could soon be a monopoly, with a single company controlling nearly all web search for its commercial gain. That would not be good for users of the internet.

Nutch provides a transparent alternative to commercial web search engines. Only open source search results can be fully trusted to be without bias. (Or at least their bias is public.) All existing major search engines have proprietary ranking formulas, and will not explain why a given page ranks as it does. Additionally, some search engines determine which sites to index based on payments, rather than on the merits of the sites themselves. Nutch, on the other hand, has nothing to hide and no motive to bias its results or its crawler in any way other than to try to give each user the best results possible.

Nutch aims to enable anyone to easily and cost-effectively deploy a world-class web search engine.