An Oasis

Nutch

Via WebmasterWorld I read about Nutch, "a nascent effort to implement an open-source web search engine."

Concerned that the search oligopoly will soon become a the Nutch folks (a handful of developers working part-time) have so far built a 100 million page demo system which is not open to the public through lack of resources.

The Organisations directors include some luminaries (Tim O'Reilly & Mitch Kapor) and interestingly Peter Savich from Overture Research (a part of Overture - the paid placement powerhouse see Yahoo! buying Overture for $1.63 Billion.) Bernhard Seefeld notes that some of the developers are pretty well credentialed too - "Ah, looking closer at the list of developers I spot Doug Cutting, 10+ year IR-veteran and Lucene author (which probably explains the choice of Java). And also Ben Lutch, co-founder of Excite. Exciting!"

The Google Brand is pretty strong for search, based only partly on the quality of results. I reckon that any group of people would be hard pushed to compete with the whole Google, but perhaps this could, if and when it comes to anything technically, possibly slightly affect Google in the syndicated search market, i.e. those portals who currently use Google as a search partner. Rather than licensing technology they can run it in-house "for free".

Of course, if businesses subscribed to that mantra then MS Windows wouldn't be on any desktops...

Posted by Paul at August 22, 2003 04:48 AM |