<$BlogRSDUrl$> Marcus P. Zillman, M.S., A.M.H.A. Author/Speaker/Consultant
Marcus P. Zillman, M.S., A.M.H.A. Author/Speaker/Consultant
Internet Happenings, Events and Sources


Monday, August 11, 2003  

Nutch Open-Source Web Search Engine
http://www.nutch.org/

The Nutch Project 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. This is a substantial challenge. To succeed, Nutch software must be able to:

* fetch several billion pages per month
* maintain an index of these pages
* search that index up to 1000 times per second
* provide very high quality search results
* operate at minimal cost

Nutch is looking for donations and developers. Open source projects continue to benefit Internauts as well as Newbies to the Internet and we need to give full support to this project both in time and money! Additional information on the Nutch Project may be found at their website or at their SourceForge development site by clicking here.

Another open source project that has been around for awhile is Grub's Distributed Web Crawling Project with additional information by clicking here. Leveraging the power of distributed computing, Grub allows everyone with an Internet connection to participate in the last frontier of discovery. By downloading the unique screensaver, you can donate your computer's unused bandwidth to probing the hidden depths of the Web. Another interesting and well deserving project that will benefit all!

posted by Marcus Zillman | 10:48 AM
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