Slashdot Mirror
Building a Bigger Search Engine
skreuzer writes "Wired is running a story about a distributed web crawler called Grub. People who choose to download and run the client will assist in building the Web's largest, most accurate database of URLs. This database will be used to improve existing search engines' results by increasing the frequency at which sites are crawled and indexed. Conceivably, Grub's distributed network could enable state information to be gathered on every document on the Internet, each and every day."
Also the grub engine crawls everything, including adult content and other questionable content. They have a setting to turn it off, but it does not block it. With the current questioning of international law relating to accessing illegal websites this could have major consequences for the average user.
So for the time being I have stopped using the grub client until some serious questions are answered. It's an interesting concept and if it was being used in more of an academic setting it could be interesting. However I believe that search engines like Google are doing pretty good themselves.
Go calculate something
LookSmart hopes to tap the altruistic nature of many Internet users.
That unfortunately seems like a naively optimistic hope. While the
vast majority of people may be altruistic, it only takes a few
unscrupulous individuals to completely undermine a fair result.
It's interesting that this idea is an extension to Google's model in
many ways. Essentially Google is able to index so much of the
interent by having 50,000+ servers. I don't think that's what makes
Google such a useful search tool, rather I think it's accuracy and
relevancy. If my search results started getting poluted with bogus
hits, I would stop using it almost immediately.
Unfortunately, by letting people run the client on their machine and
having it send the results back to the server, I think spoofed
results are inevitable. I don't think it will be possible to
safeguard the results either, it will be interesting to see how well
this project survives *when* people start spoofing results. It's
been a problem for SETI@home, and it's something that undermined some
peoples faith in the project as a whole. If the spoofed results are
more widespread and have a larger impact as they would in a system
like this, it may ultimately prove fatal to the project.
One factor that has been asbolutely critical to Google's success has
been their ability to remain resistant to spoofing attempts. It's
still a question mark how well grub will perform in that context.
Doug Tolton
"The destruction of a value which is, will not bring value to that which isn't." -John Galt
I bet one of the big successes in Folding and distributed.net is that many people run the clients on work boxes, knowing that there's little actual overhead incurred to their work. How different that is for a URL sucker.
I wonder what broadband ISPs think of Grub.
Grub searches the web
... and I have a suggestion. Has anyone written a program called "E-Coli" yet? No? I can just imagine my mom ...
Sniffing out all the good porn
Not just bootloader
I love being a Slashdot subscriber - it gives me fifteen minutes to figure out a good joke before anyone has a chance to post!
Seriously though, shouldn't they change the name? "GRUB" is already a bootloader. They should change the name
"Agh! You have E-Coli on your computer!"
Cyde Weys Musings - Scrutinizing the inscrutable
What are sensible business plans for this type of endeavour?
Should we expect to see many commercial efforts focussed on providing similar "crawl" or "index" capabilities, but each honed to a specific niche market? A scientific crawler? A retail links database?
One could argue that similar efforts targeting music resources have resorted to less automated techniques, i.e. human-driven sharing.
Thoughts?
until someone figures out a way to compromize their local client's results and "escalate" their fave URLS.
It still sounds like a really cool idea though.
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
Hmm searchengine eh? Why don't you call it grab ?
Robert
1. Tech-savvy people will install this.
2. Tech-savvy people tend to be loners.
3. Loners most often search for porn.
C1. Tech-savvy people search for porn.
4. Items searched for most often reach the top of the list.
5. Porn is searched for often by tech-savvy people.
C2. Porn will be easier to find with this new search engine.
Count me in!
This is going to challenge Google's search, which will entice them to cut loose some of those really cool google labs concepts. Froogle, Google News, and all of the other cool things that they are working on are great services and are going to be the focus of innovation over at Google.
Also, Looksmart needs to develop and release an API for this system. You can only use the google api for 2,000 searches per. day. If they allowed unlimited usage, it would get a lot of developer backing.
I don't keep a lid on my coffee so when I walk around I look busy -me
Oh wait, you mean it's not related to GRUB, the Linux/etc boot loader. *slaps forehead* But I guess this solves everything - we can call Phoenix "Grub" too, and just treat it as the generic name to call everything we're having problems thinking up a name for...
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
So if I choose to run this client, how do I know that it won't accidentally index content that is only accessible from behind my firewall?
Couldn't google do this anyways with the google toolbar? Cause with the advanced features version it tracks every page you visit. If they offered some incentive to install the toolbar, google could just beat them at this game. I actually use the google toolbar already by choice (it makes my web searching more productive) everyday, all they have to do is get lots of people using it and wouldn't that work just as well or better?
...rather a crawl with a distributed component.
They use the screensaver grub clients to check if a web page has been modified since the last time it was crawled (by the centralized crawl done by Looksmart). They probably use some smart MD5 checksum of the pages and send that with the urls to be crawled to the clients. If the checksum of what the grub client crawled doesn't match then the centralized crawl is instructed to re-fetch that url.
They go this route because the If-Modified-Since HTTP 1.1 request is not supported by many webservers (and even if it is, you can't really trust it). This is especially true for dynamically generated web pages. I.e., if If-Modified-Since would work reliably then it would be a simple operation to check if a previously crawled page has changed. Since that's not the case, they are outsourcing the expensive refetching of whole pages.
It will be interesting to see how this pans out. I think they could run into trouble with ISPs if this really takes off (because bandwidth consumption per user would increase and make flatrate deals less profitable for some ISPs).
It's kind of funny and a bit ironic that search engines are generally used to search information from a central repository and Grub uses a distributed network to index pages. It's almost like having a distributed google cache (that's updated more frequently). Perhaps a better idea would be to invent a crawling daemon that runs on each server with a standard protocol that reports to a central server the relevence of search terms (hey it's DNS for search terms!!) - to bad it would be heavily abused (mostly by Buy Now, Free Money and Pron avenues I suppose).
Ok now tell me that it's already been done, 'cause I'm pretty sure it has (and probably by Microsoft for ad money).
Well it's an idea that might be more efficient and updatable than Grub anyway.
Who is this "Poster" guy and why does he own all of my comments?!?
...those pigeons can't be beat.
Looksmart is only using Grub to save on their bandwidth. Essentially Grub just compresses web pages before sending them to Looksmart's indexer thus reducing the bandwidth they have to pay for by a factor of 5 or so. The same thing could be accomplished through a proxy which compresses web pages. Eventually, once the HTTP mime standard for requesting compressed web pages is better supported by web servers, Grub will not be necessary.
What's the difference between my machine indexing them and the university students recently being hauled into court for indexing open shares? Why would I not be held liable for contributory copyright infringement?
No thanks.
Here is what slashdotters were saying about grub almost 2 years ago.
Raisinettes are my raison d'etre
From the readme in the linux version - no idea what the other readmes might say. However, it appears that they are sensitve to the fact that bootloader grub pre-existed their program. They are requesting catchy names. Here is an excerpt:
Notice
======
The main executable has been renamed to "grubclient" out of respect for the GNU Grub bootloader, who's executable is named "grub". They were out first, so we decided to pick another name. If you have a catchy suggestion for a new name, please let us know.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
I prefer grid.org to grub.org. There the cycles are going to cancer or smallpox research. Currently over 2 million machines are participating.
Altruism has its place, but since I'm more likely to die of cancer than of not having the complete www indexed I think I'll be selfish and work towards a cure for something that may affect me.
i wonder if google has already seen this coming (i've seen that grub fellow in my logs a number of times and sort of wondered about it), and is going to use their own distributed search engine once they get the bugs hammered out...
I expected some way to search... this looks more like a project to index the web rather than make the results available for public use via web interface. Did it strike anyone else odd that there was no web form on the home page with which to search?!
It seems like a good concept, but the availability of the information collected needs to be accessible without installing the client. I'm not game to install distributed computing apps without some freely available benefit. The "for the good of the world" motivation went out the window for me about a day after my first Seti At Home experience. (But now BitTorrent, there was appreciable benefit. I had RedHat 9 isos within 8 hours of their initial release!)
There is no need to use a SlashDot sig for SEO...
You have to be kidding or working for Microsoft, or both! Have you ever searched for Linux on MSN? Try it - here.
Notice the third result? "Learn about the Microsoft alternatives and how to move to them from open source products." I shit you not! I don't think Google would ever use this kind of dirty, underhanded trick. Great "hand-picking", mate.
We're only gonna die from our own arrogance, that's why we might as well take our time...
Grub isn't a heavy cpu users. Right now, on my Athlon (~2400+), it's using between 0-2% of the CPU at any given time. Grub is mainly interested in your excess bandwidth.
Google doesn't index user sigs, so stop trying to "Google Bomb" with them.
Isn't Looksmart/Sprinks a big pay-per-listing deal? The looksmart logo in the upper right corner was enough to make me just close that page right away without any second thought.
Morphing Software
But it still kind of irks me that people think that a computerized 'dumb' search result could compete with a human rating system that filters spam,porn,and other garbage results. Google should hire some REAL PEOPLE that can do some sort catagorized intelligent directory so we can have QUALITY at the beginning of a search result. Some sort of HUMUN RATING system is needed to sort. The software is not up to par.
Not to mention:
Results 1-15 of about 609 containing "linux"
I seem to remember there being more than 609 websites with Linux information on them...
According to the Grub FAQ, it respects robots.txt although not the META tags. Although it takes a week or two for it to listen to the robots.txt, it does eventually...
The sheer volume of this project concerns me, however. The very fact that it got Slashdotted may cause it to be a bit heavier than expected!
It sounds like a good use of spare bandwidth, but if it's going to wind up a superscanner, it's going to send a hell of a lot of requests.
I tried it and deleted it as quickly: it's not very good at being a bottom feeder, it redlined my system resources immediately and slowed everything down. Duration between installation and uninstallation: twenty-nine seconds.
Warning: Poster of this comment is a nerd. Just like everybody else here.
...as the web gets larger and more cluttered.
I've already discovered this with comic books turned into movies. Finding synopses of the comic book X-Men is nigh impossible. Finding syopses of the movie s is much, much easier. Damn near every site online about X-Men, Spiderman, The Hulk, Batman, etc. deal with the movies, and sifting through the cruft is not easy. And that's just comic books. Other topics can be just as hard to find, and this doesn't even touch upon fake search results that only turn up porn or worse, a blank page (happens frequently).
Searching for MORE stuff isn't going to help. Searching better is the key. Google goes a long way towards this, but even it has the same problems of finding too much crud.
(Oh, I can't remember. Have I MetaModerated Recently?)
sulli
RTFJ.
Yea. If you help Grub, Grub gives your web site a preferencial listing. Building the biggest search engine, sure. Building good search results, not so sure.
- makes me feel warm and fuzzy about my altruism
- can run in the background on a Unix box
- is open-source (so I don't have to run someone's closed-source app on my box and trust their
security through obscurity)
Well, #1 rules out Grub, #2 rules out Folding@Home, and #3 rules out both SETI@Home and Folding@Home.So what worthy causes are out there?
Find free books.
If this thing gets too popular without proper throttling, they could cause real havoc.
Copyright Violation:"theft, piracy"::Anti-Trust Violation:"thermonuclear price terrorism"<-Overly dramatic language.
Alright, I have 3 major problems with this...
1) How different is this than the princton kiddies system? I don't know about you, but I don't want a 95 billion dollar bill arriving in the mail...
2) What if you local (cache?) contains a few links to kiddie porn? Not your fault, right? Software does it's own thing, you cannot control, BUT what will the FBI think? The FBI Scottland Yard, RCMP are currently heavily investigating Kiddie Porn cases (good work IMHO), but what if your the unlucky sap who getts stuck with a few sketchy URLs? Or Worse Yet, what if this GRUB keeps a cache of the website like google does? Then what?
3) What about material that is legal locally, but illegial somewhere else... eg. Nazi stuff in Germany, Falun Gong in China, etc... The last thing I want is to be refused to be given a travel visa cuz my PC has an illegial cache...
Good idea in principle, but with sketchy content on the web, I don't think I will be the one keeping track of it all. If there is a way to filter out the questionable stuff then maybe, but since the purpose is to be as inclusive as possible, it seems incompatible.
_CMK
Bad spellers of the world untie!
You can always use the Google API for more than 2,000 searches per day if you pay licensing fees for it. That's just Google ensuring that it can remain a viable company. Little text-box advertisements just don't cut it in this day and age where blatant pop-ups and colorful banner ads don't even have much turn-around. That's not the point though.
The point is that I wouldn't look anytime soon for LookSmart to allow unlimited usage of this API. It's too large of a project for them to just let people use it. It's simple economics. They may not be investing the computing resources into this projects web spidering software, but it's still using TONS of resources to keep this data catalogued and readily accessible.
A DDoS is only effective because it's a whole bunch of messages all at once to one target- in the 100,000,000 range for a full-scale attack, to always cover all the positions.
The database of "check-me"s is randomized rather evenly. Even if this takes off, I don't see how it could really do serious damage to any but the truly dinky servers: the hits will not come in all at once and flood the whole connection. While it very well could end up a constant stream, it's unlikely to be the massive stream that makes a DDoS.
It does have the potential to slow servers across the world, but that's okay- it will slow home users' connections across the world by using 1/4 of them, too, so nobody will actually notice.
Warning: Poster of this comment is a nerd. Just like everybody else here.
Another quote I like is, "Windows operating systems do not provide X Windows. For X Windows connectivity, developers need a third-party X Windows server.". Of course Microsoft would never be anticompetitive by competing with third-party suppliers of implementations of an open standard, right?
It's not as bad as you make it out to be. They do point out (in fine print) that it is a "featured" site. They list the "featured" sites first, then the sponsored links, and then general web hits. And they mark each category. I guess that the only differencebetween featured and sponsored is in the price. All this was far from obvious to me when I saw the results at first (being used to Google), but I imagine that if you used them on a daily basis you would quickly become used to skipping down to the real results.
It's a "featured site". Meaning it's a site from Microsoft, a Microsoft partner, or someone who paid some money to Microsoft for the privilege.
Nothing that other search sites don't do. They just mark their paid adverts a little more obviously.
I am NOT a man!
I am a free number!
dude, get over yourself....
I never heard tell of Grub.org before.
I found it interesting....
not every link on slashdot is going to directly relate to you....
--meh--
It is too easy to send currupted information into the database. They have *no choice* but to trust the clients. Sure they could run spot checks on the results, but they would be very partial and it would be easy enough to fake responses for those as well.
So the more popular it gets, the more incentive people will have to promote their sites by feeding it fake index information. If this magically got to be very popular, within weeks search results would become meaningelss and it would drop back into obscurity. The more likely result would be that it will never become popular in the first place.
Besides, who wants to donate his CPU and bandwidth resources for a commercial company, anyway?
1. Design a search engine
2. Let everyone else fill it
3. Profit
The second step is finally found!!! YAY
it is only after a long journey that you know the strength of the horse.
The common point made by these "distributed" software authors is that there are "wasted" CPU cycles in your computer that you could donate to a project for free.
However, that is not true at all! CPU cycles are not wasted. When the CPU has nothing to do, it sleeps. At least in a modern operating system (i.e. about everything after Windows 95).
By "donating your wasted CPU cycles" you will actually increase the power consumption of your computer. This will be very noticable in a laptop, but when you watch the CPU temperature in your home system you will also see a noticable increase in temperature between an idle system and a system running a computationally intensive background task.
Probably the effect will be worse for things like keysearches, prime number searches, SETI etc than for this GRUB bot, because that probably also spends time waiting for the network (and thus returns the CPU to idle).
So before you "donate your wasted CPU cycles", please realize that this will actually cost you money.
The Austrian version of MSN is even better. If you search for Linux, the first two results are WinXP ads on the Microsoft site. And, while you're at it, try searching for google or yahoo. This will produce a popup saying "Why look for a search engine when you've already found one?".
It would be interested to just see a database that is connected to browsers, so that whenever I were to look at a page, the page data would be processed and sent to whatever search engine. Then, those sites that are updated frequently and get a lot of traffic would be more easily searched.
Just a thought.
Here it is on mine requesting it:
/robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 200 222 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; grub-client-1.07; Crawl your own stuff with http://grub.org)" /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 200 222 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; grub-client-1.07; Crawl your own stuff with http://grub.org)" /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 200 222 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; grub-client-1.07; Crawl your own stuff with http://grub.org)" /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 200 223 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; grub-client-1.07; Crawl your own stuff with http://grub.org)"
64.241.242.18 - - [18/Mar/2003:17:25:30 -0700] "GET
64.241.242.18 - - [19/Mar/2003:19:41:05 -0700] "GET
64.241.243.81 - - [30/Mar/2003:22:10:41 -0700] "GET
64.241.243.81 - - [01/Apr/2003:23:11:21 -0700] "GET
Notice those are LookSmart owned ip's and not just normal user crawlers. They seem to centrally crawl for robots.txt. They do know, however, that they need to crawl for robots.txt more often.
Uh huh, Grub is going to "run in the background" ?
No thanks!!. It just doesn't feel right. It is sort of like lending a firearm to an untrustworthy neighbor. What is in it for the lender other than potential problems?
Spyware "runs in the background" and slows up peoples machines. What really happens to one's machine performance with Grub? And, more importantly, where is my check?
Harpo Tunnel Syndrome--my wrist feels funny.