Nutch: An Open Source Search Engine

Anonymous Coward writes "Someone forwarded me this site working to create an open source search engine called Nutch. In the age of weighted rankings on search engines for profits, there's an obvious need for an unbiased search engine. After all, isn't a search engine supposed to be for finding relevant data, not as an indirect and sometimes slimy method of advertising? Nutch is clearly in their intial stages, but it would certainly get my vote." You can find the project on SF.net, and also read the Business 2.0 article on it.

Comments

Re:Slimey adverts?

[Anonymous Coward]

This project is the SOFTWARE to run a search engine. Not a corporation that needs to generate income to justify the resources required to run the search engine.

Anyone could take this source code and with enough money, challenge Google.com as the top search engine.

I see this project as a competitor to shrink wrapped search engines. IE google appliance or maybe even Folio based products. Typically corporations have many documents that need to be indexed and searchable to their needs.

I haven't seen this on the homepage but it doesn't list what content it can index. I hope it can at least index PDF's and popular Office documents.. Maybe even Media files? And what XML indexed fields? Or external metadata?

Re:Patents.

[AstroDrabb]

Does it matter? There are no innovations. ALL knowledge is based on prior knowlegde. Look in any field of study and you will soon learn that advancement is not possible without prior knowledge. What we know about computer science today is thanks to the knowledge gained by those before us. It is this way in EVERY field, Astronomy, Medical Science, Mathmatics, etc. Humankind does not grow by leaps and bounds, we grow by incremental improvements. I have not heard of ONE discovery/innovation in which the discovery/innovator was not educated in prior knowledge. Now the question we need to ask ourselves, and especially the government is do we really want the advancement of our society to be hindered by monetary interests of the greedy?