Wednesday, May 19, 2004

An Open Source Search Engine....want to adopt it and make it the next google...:)

Here is an piece on the same at link
Nutch
Search engines are as critical to Internet use as any other part of the network infrastructure, but they differ from other components in two important ways. First, their internal workings are secret, unlike, say, the workings of the DNS (domain name system). Second, they hold political and cultural power, as users increasingly rely on them to navigate online content.

When so many rely on services whose internals are closely guarded, the possibilities for honest mistakes, let alone abuse, are worrisome. Further, keeping search-engine algorithms secret means that further advances in the area become less likely. Much relevant research is kept behind corporate walls, and useful methods remain largely unknown.

To address these problems, we started the Nutch software project, an open source search engine free for anyone to download, modify, and run, either as an internal intranet search engine or as a public Web search service. As you may have just read in Anna Patterson's "Why Writing Your Own Search Engine Is Hard", writing a search engine is not easy. As such, our article focuses on Nutch's technical challenges, but of course we hope Nutch will offer improvements in both the technical and social spheres. By enabling more people to run search engines, and by making the code open, we hope search algorithms will become as transparent as their importance demands.

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