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Altavista - Open Sourced UPDATED
Hi there,
The new affiliate program is based on a syndicated model, where we are providing the HTML and search box interface to Web sites, large and small to enable their users to access AltaVista's premier services including search, stock quotes, language translation, multimedia, news and discussion group content. Users can choose from an array of search boxes that fit their personal brand. The search box then acts as a gateway for users to tap into our robust index. Those Web sites that choose to participate inAltaVista's Affiliate Network will receive three cents per click-through when their users access AltaVista branded services. To learn more about the affiliate program visit http://doc.altavista.com/affiliate/.
This program is not to be confused with the other products we provide that do allow customers to access our source code and build their own search products. We provide an array of tools that allow customers to create their own customized engines and can be accessed at http://doc.altavista.com/business_solutions/search_products/search_intranet/ intranet_intro.shtml.
Yeah! Open source is getting more an more popular. I didn't see anything about the liscensing agreement though. Are they going to go with the GPL?
kwsNI
The article doesn't mention that Altavista is going to open source theit source code. It says that the source code will be given to applicants who can present a "real" web site they are running.
It would be great news if the source code would truly be GP-licensed or whatever OS license model Altavista would choose, but I doubt they will do that. Also remember that the search engine that you can obtain from Alta Vista is not the same as the one that's running their web site. It used to be downloadable before, and my information is that it does not scale as good as the AltaVista.com web page search engine does.
Yes, you are right there. -- Another glass of champagne?
An evolving search engine.. cool! They need some way of continuously verifying links. I used to use Altavista when it first came out years ago but I quickly started getting large amounts of 404's. I've heard they've improved, but that seems to be a common problem with search engines. Maybe Open Source can fix that.
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
..I needed something to do with that huge pile of Alphas I had just sitting in the corner gathering dust...
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
and language translation service
Give a man a babelfish, he understands for a day. GPL the babelfish, then embed it, and he gets a real cool palm app next year.
(Note: the letters GPL do not appear in the article, nor is app a real word)
+&x
Do I hear ...?
All opinions are my own - until criticized
I could not find the code in Altavista site. I guess the code is not open in the sense of the Open Source Definition. If you need to sign an agreement with Altavista to get the code, then it has a somewhat liberal license but not enough to be called open. I hope I am wrong and this is not just another company trying to capitalize on a trendy term without honoring it.
Wonder what the minimum spec will be?
I remember Altavista in 1995 was running on a machine with 4GB of memory.
I think that this, and the Netscape Communicator/Mozilla effort, mark a sea change when it comes to software development. When a body of code had no value to a company, they used to quietly bury the body. Now, more and more companies release the code to the community, gaining a huge investment in goodwill.
Philosophically, it's a move away from the Marxist conception of value (which is paradoxically de rigeur in US business circles), where anything requiring work gained in value. This isn't obviously false, but false it is. Value, at least in the capitalist system, is based on the ability to sell at a profit. If you cannot sell at a profit, either using the technology or the technology itself, then it's valueless.
Most businessmen stick to the assumption that all the work put into this or that piece has made it valuable and worthy of protection. New businessmen are thinking it through - not everything that takes work is valuable, and protecting something valueless is a waste of effort. By open-sourcing the work, they turn a loss into a gain.
--
--
There is no premature anti-fascism. -Ernest Hemingway
Having said that, note that Alta Vista are keeping their actual database to themselves - this is the one real asset other than their brand which they possess. Taking these two together, we see a core competence (i.e. leveraging them provides a return disproportionate to effort in relation to the market sector), which is now the basis of their revenue plan.
Sorry, slightly OT - but I thought it was funny. BTW, altavista.digital.com still works.
kwsNI
Given how intrusive search engines can be
(you want to download every single file
in the
Cypherpunks Archives? That's about 100k and
growing!), and how similar a lot of what they're
doing is, it would be really nice if the search
engines banded together and shared their raw data
over a private extranet, rather than every single
spider anyone with a spare PC decides to run
pillaging my website in turn. It's not such
a big deal for a well connected site like mine,
but for people on the end of a 9.6kbps link in
the developing world, search engine hits can
impose a high burden, but one which must be
borne to have one's content searchable.
The sites could still differentiate themselves
in spider technology by using their own custom
formats, analysis, etc., but ideally, whenever
one downloaded a page via http from an end-user
server, it would be available to the other
search engines automatically over private, high
speed links. By doing this, they'd all be able
to update more frequently, yet reduce overall
load on the net as a whole.
I suspect this will be more of a problem, not
less one one, in the future, and despite
the pitched competition in the search engine
industry, it'd be nice to see them work together
to improve the quality of the net as a whole.
After all, it's not a zero sum game!
I'm not sure how these search engines work but I am sure that Altavista seems to suck these days.
If I understand things correct they index pages based on their meta-tags. Anyone who has been to a porno/warez-site and checked the source code knows that the meta-tag is 100 pages long and filled whit all kinds off stuff that can't be found anywhere on the page.
I remeber when I put "Ferrari" in my tag on my homepage and ended up as the first hit on a search for "ferrari".. way to go Altavista
I prefer to do my searches with google.com. It's quicker and the results are much more accurate. Heck, I've even used the "I feel lucky"-button a few times.
...from what I can tell, at least.
I think the journalist in the above article has got it all wrong. I can't see anything on the Altavista site regarding the source being opened up.
What they are doing, however, is running an affiliate program that pays web site owners a commission (3c per click through, in this case) for each user that is referred to one of the various AltaVista search facilities from another web page (that has applied, and been approved, for this program).
This is not anything particularly new - as it happens, GoTo.com has been running a very similar scheme for quite a while. GoTo.com's program, as well as AltaVista's, is managed by befree.net.
So, you sign up, put the search boxes on your site, typically pointing to a unique url so they can track your referals, and start collecting money. You don't host their search engine - merely point to it.
If, on the other hand, i've missed something, I would appreciate any pointers to the actual AltaVista source code.
...j
One fact which all the search engines must
realize, as well as cache companies like
Inktomi and Akamai, is that the Internet is
becoming increasingly dynamically-generated,
personalized, and transactional -- exactly the
kind of content least suited for static
spider-driven search engines and static cache
technology.
Perhaps this will be the first Internet
subcategory to fall from vastly overinflated
stock valuations due to technical change.
The article actually doesn't expand on the source code freedom beyond the mention in the title, which is more than a little frustrating.
This is interesting, but really all they are doindg is starting yet another affiliate program, albeit with a source code giveaway. As people have already mentioned, the source is not open in the GPL/BSD/artistic license sense, rather they're letting people who enter their affiliate program use it. This is almost identical to the model used by Infoseek and Excite, except that people get to compile the source, and they pay by being an advertising shill instead of just buying a license to use the search engine.
Yours truly,
Mr. X
The article doesn't mention that Altavista is going to open source theit source code. It says that the source code will be given to applicants who can present a "real" web site they are running.
It would be great news if the source code would truly be GP-licensed or whatever OS license model Altavista would choose, but I doubt they will do that. Also remember that the search engine that you can obtain from Alta Vista is
not the same as the one that's running their web site. It used to be downloadable before, and my information is that it does not scale as good as the AltaVista.com web page search engine does.
Another little piece of info regarding the use of a search engine. Basically you need a large ammount of disk space (on the order of terabytes) to actually get a search engine up and running. You need that database or else when I want to look at ancient Zulu fingernail clippings I will not find them in your search engine. This really will not empower many people to do anything special at all.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
Right now I think it's generally about 3 months or so before Altavista rechecks a link. All it would take to try lower the number of 404's you get is to lessen that time. But they're still growing, so they devote more of their bandwidth to finding new sites rather than continuously rechecking already indexed sites. How will opensourcing their software will change that?
Altavista has been offering its search engine (executables) for download for quite a while here. It is not the same engine they use on their web site.
Here is the press release from Altavista.
Yes, you are right there. -- Another glass of champagne?
Altavista news got the story from ZDnet. Would have expected it to be the other way around.
Well, I though it was funny
The Altavista Affiliate Program Agreement states:
(Italics added for emphasis.)
I don't really see how Altavista giving people some HTML source - no matter how "proprietary" - counts as them opening their source code to their search engine, which seems to be what the article is trying to imply. Many other sites - Lycos, for one - have had similar programs in the past, though the $0.03 per clickthrough sounds like a different twist.
Chalk it up as effective marketing - they put the words "open" and "source" in the same sentence, and managed to generate the expected amount of talk about what is essentially a non-event. 'Course, I may have missed the "Download Altavista search engine source here!" link on their site, but I don't think so :-)
"Great men are not always wise: neither do the aged understand judgement." Job 32:9
Hey, that should be
... not
...
Here
-- Dr. E --
Be an Internet Search Partner (from the home page). Right down the bottom of that page, you'll see a link to the AltaVista Affiliate Network, which is what the article is talking about.
T&C's, FAQs, etc., can be found at the second URL.
...j
...and here is why: "To join the 'network,' a site must demonstrate that it is a valid, working Web site that is updated on an ongoing basis."
but... "AltaVista plans to target the owners of personal home pages in the future." so maybe there is hope that they will start releasing the code to the rest of us soon.
(darren)
Do we get the super-powerful keyword-to-marketing engine that AV runs with our favorite doubleclick? Or is it a plug-in? Can we plug in the slash ad code (when it gets released? ;)
Seriously, tho, I'll believe this has happened when I have code in hand running on my intranet, without co-branding or marketing.
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
I've been waiting for someone to opensource the Altavista search engine. Now I can finally put the old rusting Cray to use that's in the backyard.
Can't you read? From the article refrenced:
...and will start paying sites that successfully refer people to the portal."
"The portal will begin giving away the source code for its search engine..."
Th above part says: they will give away source code.
Now for the AND part (that means they will be doing both things).
"
This part, with refrences to other parts of the article, is the part about who gets to be PAID. Noplace in the article does it say you have to be "worthy" in some way to get the source code.
And this tripe gets a score of 3?
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
Sounds liek an idea for an open source project -- a distributed search engine. Each node indexes a small part of the net and shares the results with every node that requests it... then all we need is a few high volume portals to direct requests to the various member nodes (taking into account their relative speed and balancing the load) and we've got one potentially big, reliable, and fast search engine.
Any takers?
-- WhiskeyJack
Sigh... Pecavi
All opinions are my own - until criticized
UPDATED February 1, 2000
In a shameless attempt to gain attention from popular news sites that will post any story that includes the phrase "Open Source," internet portal site AltaVista announced that it will begin giving away the source code to it's search engine while actually doing no such thing.
Today Altavista rolled out an affiliate program which "allows" web sites to include html that links to the altavista search engine. Altavista did not address the question of why this is interesting, when people have been including search engine textboxes on their pages since 1994. Instead they prominently featured the phrase "Open Source" in the press release title, and went on to not mention even once how "allowing users to include html" could be interpreted as "releasing the source code to it's search engine."
You may still download a crippled trial version of Altavista's intranet search tools, which you may uncripple for a registration fee. But the bold maneuver of issuing a press release that uses the words "open source" is taking the internet by storm.
"We see this press release as an unprecedented opportunity to leverage traffic from weblogs that don't do even the most rudimentary fact-checking," said an Altavista spokesman. "And we know for a fact that there are some very high traffic sites which auto-post any press release that uses the words 'open source,' without a human editor even being involved."
The perl scripts which post content at the popular computer news site Slashdot declined to comment on the allegations that no human is involved in story posting anymore, saying only, "It looks like a hole in the GNU GPL [may allow] people to practically turn GNU-free software into proprietary software..."
----------------
Note: This is intended mostly to be a flame at altavista, and to mildly poke fun at slashdot. Please take it for the humor it is. Thanks.
--The Mgmt.
----------------
Wish you could moderate the submission queue?
There is no K5 cabal.
I am not the real rusty.
I agree... However, I can tell you it's not English - specific, it's the same in french...
"The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers." Bill Gates,
For people like me, who are the vast majority of people who want to use the alta vista search engine, the open sourcing of the product (if they will be open sourcing it) is terrific news.
I'm amused how in English, "a fraction of" implies "a fraction less than zero", when of course "a fraction of" could be, for example, "eight thirds".
I don't think that's right. A fraction of (since I do speak basically only English and it is my native tongue) refers to a part of. I have never heard that it means less than zero anywhere. Plus anything less than zero is negative and there are not many ways you can have negative quantities in terms of something like a dictionary unless the dictionary had a method of erasing memory engrams.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
WIth the open-sourcing of a search engine (yes, i know there are others too..) does anyone thijnk much about say a distributed computing based search engine? A sort of spider on every computer, using unused network resources plus cpu cycles? This seems pretty theoretical right now plus i could see privacy concerns a mile away, but a "peoples" search engine could at the least be an interesting marketing gimmick...
chimchim.
It seems you have missed the point of Open Source entirely. OSS is not about "Anyone can get the source code", it's about "Anyone can get the source code, modify it, publish the results and do what the heck he wants with it (well, almost)".
With respect to being "worthy": I read the press release as stating that you will have to become an "Affiliate" before you get the source code; and for becoming an affiliate you have to present a web site you are running.
The press release is ambigious about this, so maybe I am wrong. (But if I am wrong: where is the download page for the source code?)
Yes, you are right there. -- Another glass of champagne?
i plan to make an open sourced search engine called gritsavista.com. it will only contain web pages of people who like to pour bowls of hot grits down their pants. thank you.
that link is just Altavista's news syndication services republishing the ZD story which started the brouhaha -- they have not yet issued a press release as far as I can tell.
bumppo
When the porn-industry can get to the sourcecode, they'll find even more ways to get the first thousand hits no matter what your keywords are... AltaVista became useless years ago...
If enough people refuse to use the AltaVista service, =and= let them know why, they may either be pushed into apologising or releasing =some= source, which is better than nothing at all.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
This has been suggested several times before on slashdot, and is as unlikely now as ever. Parallelizing a search engine would probably make it slower, as the latency between machines on the internet (not to mention the bandwidth) is terrible. Imagine if I search for United States and get 5 million hits on each from different machines. You then have to transfer the hitlists to one of the machines and do the comparison. You just got killed on your fast clause.
What would be more useful is a cluster of machines, each having the whole database. You would have to update all machines every night, but you might gain something from this approach.
--
Mike Mangino Consultant, Analysts International
Mike Mangino
mmangino@acm.org
I think the author you are quoting meant less than one, rather than less than zero.
When people say "I got it for a fraction of the retail cost!" they are implying that they got it for less than that normal cost, for example 1/2 price, when the litteral translation of "fraction" into most (?) languages would not nesseseryly imply this, but would mean any fraction - ie a number expressed as a/b, like 4/3 or 8/3. There are many numbers most accurately expressed as fractions.
I appologise for my spelling - ThadThad
Now maybe someone can make a version of AltaVista like it used to be without all this portal crap.
Are you a native speaker of English? Because in standard English, the word fraction has (to my understanding) always meant a portion less than the whole, and often significantly less than the whole. In mathematical English, the technical term "fraction" is essentially a synonym for "rational number", which is a number which can be represented as the quotient of two integers. (Exercise for the reader: prove that the rational numbers have a one-to-one correspondence with the integers.)
The technical meaning of mathematical terms often has little to do with the standard English meaning of those words. Another good example of this is "imaginary" (as in "imaginary number). Many people (collegiate mathematics students among them) still believe that imaginary numbers are somehow less real (to use the standard English meaning) than real numbers, when in fact all complex numbers (pure imaginaries and reals included) are equally abstract.
Open Source is very open (forgive the pun) in terms of what it applies to. I can Open Source my new Widget2000 code and only sell it to people who buy Widget2000 and require them to not reveal the source code to anyone else. Or I can Open Source it and post it on a public FTP site.
;)
Every appliction may have a different terms of agreement for how the source is handled. If anything, this is incentive to READ before you buy or mess with someone's source code. You should be reading the licensing anyways, but I know MS liks to put it inside shrink wrap before selling things.
Bad Mojo
Bad Mojo
"If you can't win by reason, go for volume." -- Calvin
CMGI has finally seen fit to issue a press release. Surprise! they really are cheeky enough to suggest that a snippet of HTML constitutes open source.
http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/00 0201/ca_altavis_1.html
Excerpt:
"The AltaVista Affiliate Network is leading the expansion of our
distinctive services throughout the Web, at a global scale," said
Rod Schrock, president and CEO of AltaVista Company. "This
program will effectively open source AltaVista Search and
translation services thereby extending our brand to the Internet
community."
Smug bastards.
bumppo
"Can't you read? From the article refrenced: ". Yeah, because we all know that ZDNet never makes mistakes or says untrue things, right?
Maybe you should go read the AltaVista press release. They don't say anything like "Here is our source code, and here is the license". They talk a lot about business solutions and how you can obtain a modified version of their search engine. In a 5 minute look around their site I wasn't able to see anything about what license they were planning to use, or even verify that the search engine they were allowing you to download was not in binary form.
I hope that ZDNet got their story right, but the way the said things I was expecting to see a press release from AltaVista saying "AltaVista open-sources search engine technology!". Not seeing that bothers me.
C'mon, you should know better than to accept at face value what you read in something at ZDNet without checking the source of the story.
Many entities "Give away" their source to certain individuals and entities. That is no way, shape, or form, means that they are opening up the source in general, as in an Open Source project.
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
Is this really good? "Of course", you yell. Anything open source must be good, people can work on it, and improve it and blah blah blah. Look at Mozilla, how much has it improved? How many people actually put work in it? If altavista had been open sourced a long time ago, would google have existed? Would the google guys have thought about coming up with new ideas, or would they have just blindly worked on simply improving the original source? ...
------ Curiosity killed the cat. {satisfaction brought it back | it didn't die ignorant | lack of it is killing mankind
AltaVista is jointly owned by CMGI and Compaq, they get advertising revenue from DoubleClick, and one look at their press page shows that they're making deals left and right, among other things.
So why this click-thru service anyway? Isn't this just the last resort for porn webmasters and script kiddies? What exactly does this prove...that at the mention of the phrase "open source," people come running? This just doesn't make any sense to me.
Thoughts?
--
The real Raunchola isn't cool enough to have any imposters
The article just got yanked.
If anyone read through the affiliate program materials, there is no mention of any source code. Just the program itself. You put code to reference the toold/search on Altavista's site, and get paid $3 per clickthrough! Not all that lucrative unless you have alot of traffic.
penguinicide... when jumping out a window just won't do.
Actually it's $.03 per clickthrough.
penguinicide... when jumping out a window just won't do.
I made no point about "OpenSource" at all, so how do you know if I missed it? I repeated what the article said, that AltaVist is "giving away" the source code. Yes, I know there is a difference, that is why I did not say "open source". Maybe you can e-mail Hemos about his misuse?
BTW, ZDNET has apparently pulled the story already (no, not slashdotted, "page not found" and headline removed from ZDNET). I do not know where anybody saw the AltaVista press release saying you must be an affiliate to get the source, but it is not showing up here live.altavista.com, so I am just going from the articles that I have working links to.
You guys MAY be right, but I have yet to see ANYTHING saying that AltaVista requires affiliation acceptance to get a copy of the source.
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
1) First, you have to have a personal home page which is regularly updated. I haven't updated my personal home page in quite a while- it was really just a very short exercise in HTML- but I still access it almost daily. I have links to Alta Vista and Deja.com which use the text-only interfaces. I use them all the time. It's here just in case anyone's interested. Does incrementing some web counter count as "regularly updated"?
2) For my personal home page, I was only allowed access to two scripts provided in my ISP's cgi-bin. If you wanted your own cgi-bin, you needed to buy a commercial account. How many other personal home pages have similar restrictions?
Even though I don't have anything worth indexing, I have to wonder just what Alta Vista's thinking with this.
Little Debian: America's #1 Snack Distro!
Great!! Now where can we submit patches ??
Read the open source definition.
http://www.opensource.org/
Try LOOKING at the Altavista site? This article is apparently accurate enough for AltaVista to post themselves. (probably written for ZD by AV anyway)
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
Ask for an URL for the source code... I think I'll e-mail them this URL: http://www.opensource.org/osd.html :)
As most of us know already, major search engines use a hush-hush set of algorithms to reduce the number of spam'd enteries. (text set in the same color as the page background, really small text, keyword stuffing, etc.) By releasing the source to their engine, isn't AltaVista bascially giving the thieves keys to the treasure chest?
----
----
Am I the only one who thinks Microsoft is a misnomer? Perhaps Macrosoft would be a better fit?
Micro$oft(R) Windoze NT(TM)
(C) Copyright 1985-1996 Micro$oft Corp.
C:\>uptime
But I sure don't see the source code anywhere on their sites. I did see a free version of their search engine which I downloaded and took a look at. That didn't have the source code for sure.
So where is it? I'm getting the feeling that somewhere along the line something didn't get translated.
What would be more useful is a cluster of machines, each having the whole database.
That was _exactly_ what I was proposing.
Each node indexes a subset of the web. It then passes on its local index to the other nodes that make up the cluster, so that each individual node can accumulate a copy of the master index. Search requests are then routed to the individual nodes based on how many requests each node is currently processing, how quickly they've been responding, etc, so that none of the disparate machines that make up the search cluster get overloaded with requests. And if one of the nodes is slow to respond, the portal could just resend the request to another available node.
Those that didn't want to host requests but still wanted to help with the effort could run spiders that index a small portion of the web and make that index available to the central cluster, thereby distributing the workload further (and allowing sites to index their local networks, forinstance, where they typically have higher speed connections, then dump the resulting index off to the cluster during offpeak hours). This allows local admins to index whatever portions of their site they want as often as they want just by setting up their webserver as an index-only node in the cluster. Get enough sites doing that, and you're going to get pretty up to date results.
The indexes would only get passed on to the nodes that request them...with a little effort, it wouldn't be hard to set up request routes to allow indexes to flow from node to node via the fastest network connections possible, minimizing crosstalk between nodes (you just pass any downstream indexes upstream and vice-versa, adding in your own locally aquired index along the way) -- have the indexes propigate like news articles.
The portal machine would only need to maintain a list of IP addresses weighted according to how big a load each site is willing and able to handle, so its processor load will be minimal. Put a moderate-sized machine on the end of a big network pipe, and a few thousand nodes scattered all over the net, and you might have one nice search engine.
Sorry if my previous post confused you.
-- WhiskeyJack
Hey, it looks like their editors read /. or else someone pointed out the egregious error of the AltaVista story they had posted, since it isn't up on their site anymore (~12:45pm) and the links to the story no longer work. Go team /. !!!!
http://live.altavista.com/scripts/editorial.dll?ca tegoryid=&only=y&bfromind=980&eetype=art icle&render=y&eeid=1461716&avr=1
NetShadow
Regards, Barrie
if there really into open source, then let them release their database so that others can copy it too.
Free money.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
Yes, I want the altavista software, but more
important is to have access to the database and
leave my agents fly around inside.
retrocool
The press release is ambigious about this, so maybe I am wrong. (But if I am wrong: where is the download page for the source code?)
First, where is the link to the "press release"? I posted a link to AltaVista's news area, has everything I was quoting.
It also said Altavista TO RELEASE. Ahem, that indicates that it is NOT released YET (that is what "to release" means, as in "going to release" as in sometime in the future).
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
. o O ( In school they teach that plants have roots. How ridiculous! How can you take the root of something that's not a number? )
That's why I said to look at AltaVista's press releases. Check out the source of the information.
I am suprised that Hemos even used "Open Source" in the post. Yea, they are announcing that they will release the source code, but no telling if it will meet all of the criteria for "Open Source". Check http://www.opensource.org for more info.
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
This was all a big misunderstanding. There is no move to open the AV search source. That'd be cool, but it isn't happening today. The headline was a mistake. They meant to say that they are giving you HTML source snippets to put a search box on your web site. Though, they will be opening source to a couple of other things, if I have my way. -insider.
To hell with your karma? Indignant comments about how other articles were moderated??? Please! Jesus, slashdot is drowning in a river of total karma-induced self interest. Somebody thought the fucking article was interesting, so they marked it as interesting. GET OVER IT. Moderation is a choice that is made by the person with the points. When you get points, you can moderate however you want, including moderating something down - and then leave it for M2 to decide. But just please don't bitch about a system that you're participating in voluntarily. And I'm fucking sick of seeing people bitch about their karma this and their karma that. Karma was meant to be somewhat of a measure of your contribution to slashdot, not THE REASON TO CONTRIBUTE. And to stay on topic... BTW, the guy is still justified criticising altavista's so called open source move - go check out the open source definition (which is a watered down, bastardized version of what the GPL really means) and you will find that in order for something to be open source, it must not discriminate against particular endeavors - when altavista says that they'll only give you the source if you sign up as an affiliate and meet their restrictions, that's biased against certain endeavors. Thus, I would think that in its current form, it would not be open source.
The OpenDK development team applauds AltaVista and invites them to the premier.
Thank you.
Jon Katz will punish you for trolling!!!!!11
for more information on moduration, check out the OpenDK development team moduration guide.
Thank you.
"Welcome to you first day of Writing Press Releases for the Internet class. Now, just to make it clear. You do not need to know what buzzwords mean, just how to use them in a sentence. Everyone got that? Class dismissed, see ya next year."
+&x
This has absolutely NOTHING to do with Open Source. They are giving away pre-adorned HTML to people who want to use it. Open Source is Free Speech, not the RIGHT to Free Beer.
Come on now!
I ask this becuase the distributed concept needs to be applied to web indexing.
I used to use altavista for all of my searching, but now that the search engines are lagging so far behind in indexing the content, we're forced to try multiple search engines to find what we're looking for. Yes, there are meta-search engines, but that's not what I'm looking for.
If they're letting us at the crawling/indexing code, maybe we can build a distributed indexing system along the lines of seti@home, mprime or one of the distributed.net projects.
Between that and an indexing system along the lines of the Library of Congress indexing code systems, we could jsut tame this beast yet.
i thought i might sign up for their affiliate program, just to get the occasional $.03 check from altavista, but when i saw the application form, i was appalled.
not only does it ask for all your contact information (several times) but it asks for your social security number. all on an insecure form!
- Entertaining Bits from the Ancient Kernel Tree
I didn't see any discussion of open sourcing their technology. It appears that they are merely providing a mechanism (in HTML) so your web site can "front" a query that is fielded and handled by Altavista, with a registration and payback mechanism.
Such a scheme (without the registration or payback mechanism) has been in place for quite a while at Google:
http://services.google.com/cobrand/fr ee_trial
Obviously, I would prefer to get money for the clickthroughs I generate, but I also want my clients to get great search results as well. At any rate, if I understand correctly, this does not appear to be the "open source" surprise represented in the article.
zdnet has removed the story which was originally posted and repl aced it with an ammended version with no mention of open source. though it would have been more responsible to make mention of the previous mistake and make a retraction, this seems to be the next best thing. good going!
From the article:
I went there expecting to read that the search engine code itself had been open sourced. Instead, they're going to let you link to their search engine from your site. I could do that anyway, their cgi's parameters weren't that hard to decipher.
Gad, but journalists so gullible!
Just be sure to wear the gold uniform when you beam down -- you know what happens when you wear the red one.
Ok, here you go: /company_info/press/pr013100.shtml
http://doc.altavista.c om/company_info/press/press_news.shtml.
or in particular:
http://doc.altavista.com
See, that's what's called a "press release". There's a difference between a press release and a news article. I know, I must be really bored if I'm going to respond to childish flames from an ignorant coward, but hey, it's Tuesday.
The Altavista Affiliate program is nothing else than the amazon program: They give you graphics, some HTML *SOURCE CODE* to put on your website. Your users would then type their search parameters into the little form on your page and the results get served up by altavista.com. And you get 3 cents per click-through.
Open Source is very open (forgive the pun) in terms of what it applies to. I can Open Source my new Widget2000 code and only sell it to people who buy Widget2000 and require them to not reveal the source code to anyone else. Or I can Open Source it and post it on a public FTP site.
/. don't understand what open source really means, and point out such bastardizations of the term, then pretty soon it won't mean anything anyways.
As someone else has pointed out, neither of those actions, by itself, meets the Open Source Definition.
Furthermore, as regards both the OSD--which is derived from Bruce Perens' Debian Free Software Guidelines--and GNU's (i.e. RMS's) definition of free software, your two examples of what you do with your Widget2000 source code are probably not as different as you may think. That is, even the GPL allows you to only give source code to people who pay you for your product--it just specifies that you can't stop them from revealing the code to anyone else, or indeed from licensing it to anyone else under anything other than the GPL. Likewise, posting your source code to a public FTP site doesn't make it open source if those who download it aren't allowed to redistribute the code, and use it in derivative works or fork it.
Unless your license allows these things, then the proper term for it is not "open source" but "revealed source". (Or so says the OSS language police.) Companies seeking to capitalize on the open source movement may call actions like the ones you describe "open sourcing", but they are not--as we have understood the terms. Of course, if even those of us on
Altavista has jumped on the open source bandwagon before Slashdot's beloved Google.
neither link you gave don't have shit to do with this thread the other AC is right about you
Not only isn't this open source, it's not new. AltaVista has been running this affiliate program for a while (at least months if not a year or more) offering $.03/click through for any link including search boxes. The translation might by newly added to the program, but the program just isn't news. -Brad
You're right, the updates would be the bottleneck of the whoel shebang, not only in the terms of the bandwidth the larger index files would eat, but in terms of processor time on the search servers as they integrate the various index files into one coherent whole.
But here's a thought: How about having the search servers drop out of the cluster to perform updates, therefore dropping the load of fulfilling search requests while in the throes of creating a new index? Admittedly, it doesn't do a whole lot for the bandwidth bottleneck, but it'd make the processor hit a little less severe.
As for passing the indexes, they'd have to be signed for security (don't want spam/pr0n seeding the index), and compressed as far as possible. They'll tend to be pretty hefty regardless of what we do to 'em....but maybe we can get them down small enough to not pose too much of a bandwidth hit, particularly if each search node limits its updates to offpeak hours.
You're right, though: it'll take a lot of doing to get it right. Up for trying? :)
-- WhiskeyJack
Nevertheless this has nothing at all to do with the affiliate program they announced in the infamous press release, and we can conclude that the whole thing was either a shameless publicity stunt, or a genuine lack of understanding of what "Open Source" means by some marketing geek. I'll be charitable and assume the latter, and we can likely expect this to continue. Open Source is a hot buzzword right now, and will get mis-applied to more and more things. For a comparable example, witness the current total meaninglessness of the word "deconstruct" in Lit circles. That was once a very precise word for a particular form of literary criticism. Then it became a buzzword, and now it's been so diluted that even real deconstructionists are afraid to use it.
Wish you could moderate the submission queue?
There is no K5 cabal.
I am not the real rusty.
I've worked with the Australian AV affiliate since day one (this is a while back) and I seriously doubt that AV will release/os their source. It was quite a computer science marvel (at the time, to a fresh graduate) which DEC had invested reasonable R&D$$ into.
Back then as an affiliate, you get to access their text/HTTP-based search interface (which you can customise the results returned for your site) plus the AVSHE interface (which you don't have to use - I've managed using perl). I suspect this announcement/move is purely extending the affiliate selection (back then only large telcos are invited) so that smaller players get a chance too.
Good luck to them.
One more clarification - there are two search products - AltaVista Search V2.3, the out-of-the-box search engine, and Search Developer's Kit V2.6 (runs on Linux, by the way) which lets you build more customized search applications. We don't actually provide source code - just the SDK.
Personally, I'll take the $3 a clickthrough.
(if only it were that easy..)
*grin*
(Shameless plug): ProcessTree - Put your idletime to use.
What about distributed indexing ?
the databases of search engines are allways behind what's currently on a site, some links don't even exist anymore.
why not make distributed.net like clients that do web-indexing, getting a list of URL's from a server and visiting and indexing them, then return the result to the central server.
that way, the main search index would be a lot more up-to-date.
---
To: Jennifer Mack, ZDnet.com (jmack@zd.com)
_ _____________________
_ ____________________________
k /search.html?chkpt=zdhpsearch , 2430757,00.html
After reading your article on AltaVista.com , mistakenly believing it to be
their own work,I wrote the following letter to Altavista:
_______________________________________________
"AltaVista Opens Source Code" is an attention grabbing headline.
I read with great interest about your intent to
"begin giving away the source code for its search engine".
It's my sincere hope that this is what seems.
I'm certain that the advantages outlined in the opensource.org website
would be welcome to any organization, but I'm concerned that this might
be simply an attempt to benefit from the "buzzword value" of linux and
other prominent projects.
When and where will I be able to download the source code for the AltaVista engine?
What will the license terms be?
Will it be OSI Certified?
(and thus meet the Open Source Definition)
URL: http://www.opensource.org/osd.html
Your comments would be appreciated, and I might add that a statement made to the slashdot.org
story submission page could clear up any misunderstandings for a multitude of poeple.
URL: http://slashdot.org/submit.pl
Thanks,
C. Clark
_______________________________________________
After receiving no reply, I called.
I was told that the article in question was a ZDnet article, and
that it was incorrect, and had been corrected.
The issue I have now is that after causing a flurry of discussion and
interest, the "corrected" article fails to acknowlege the errors or explain
the difference between "Open Source" and what AltaVista is doing.
To compound the problem, the following pages are still uncorrected:
http://xlink.zdnet.com/cgi-bin/texis/xlink/xlin
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/bursts/0,7407
Any comments?
C. Clark
----
From: POSTMASTER@zd.com
Subject: Undeliverable message
------- Failure Reasons --------
Recipient user name not unique. Several matches found in Name & Address Book.
jmack@mailer.zd.com
From: POSTMASTER@zd.com
To: clarkcd@XXXXXXX
Subject: Undeliverable message
[The following text is in the "ISO-8859-1" character set]
[Your display is set for the "US-ASCII" character set]
[Some characters may be displayed incorrectly]
------- Failure Reasons --------
Recipient user name not unique. Several matches found in Name & Address Book.
jmack@mailer.zd.com
Any schmoe could write a nifty interface
to any search engine on the internet. Any shmoe doesn't need to anyway because the source to the interface is in the html!
but isn't if it's dynamically generated using Javascript, ActiveX or Yet Another Proprietary Unsearchable Technology (rhymes with "kaput" which is what would be best for this type of web technology).
Why use these technologies which completely shut off your web pages from the Internet search engines? Search engines bring visitors to your web site, visitors who could buy products or services.
What good is an invisible web site hidden inside an unmapped forest of Javascript or ActiveX, a web site that is ignored by search engines?
it happens everyday folk!
Altavista isn't posting source code. just supplying information that was allready obtainable. but packaging in a pritty box, and paying 3 cents a click... cool.
now all I have to do is set up a web site.
PimpSmurf
Stupid people do stupid things... Smart people outsmart each other... --System of a Down