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Wikia Acquires Grub, Releases it Under Open Source
An anonymous reader writes "During a keynote address at the O'Reilly Open Source Conference (OSCON), Jimmy Wales announced that Wikia has acquired Grub, the original visionary distributed search project, from LookSmart and released it under an open source license for the first time in four years. Grub operates under a model of users donating their personal computing resources towards a common goal, and is available for download and testing."
Oh fuck! Does this mean I have to read [Citation Needed] every time I boot up?
"Why did they cancel my favorite Sci-Fi show? I downloaded ALL the episodes!"
let's eat!
great.
Real mean use Lilo. Oh, wait...nevermind.
Res publica non dominetur
That's funny, I ALSO just acquired some grub, yum yum.
But where's the OS X version?
Of course at that point Google will buy Wikia and whatever other properties seem relevant... and then Google will have completed the transition from "do no evil" to "if you can't beat them, buy them" that started with YouTube.
Of course this might not be the case, but I have trouble trying to come up with a reason why Wikia might want something like Grub.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
It's a nice idea, but badly implemented. Search doesn't even work (I've tried it before, and it's never worked), and on top of that, today, search throws a bunch of mySQL errors (mySQL? for a search engine?!?!). It's a nice idea, and maybe this group will breathe some life into it, but right now, grub is doa, as far as I'm concerned.
\ I'll be excited if they make a working search engine. I'll be even more excited if they do work on the searching algorithms, which is what makes or breaks search engines, not the amount of content they have. It's what you do with the info. Anybody can spider lots and lots of information. Providing relevant results is why Google is #1 now, and those results are the results of some heavy, heavy math that is done by lots of pHD's. Spidering, which seems to be the focus of Grub, isn't a big limitation for most search engines these days.
I don't respond to AC's.
I wonder if they have any plans to be part of the BOINC project. After being a seti@home user for several years, then finally following it over to BOINC, I can't help but think of BOINC every time I hear something about distributed computing.
I know BOINC isn't the end-all-be-all of distributed computing, but it seems they gathered a large following once Seti@home project moved there, especially with what I would newbies or laymen to distributed computing in general. It might seem a smart move considering the variety of projects they already have along with their current userbase.
And they said zombies weren't real!
This is far fetching, but I read grep. Now grep as a search project uhn...
WIKIA is a for profit company!
so they want to use other peoples spare CPU cycles to build an empire on top without spending money on servers?
rofl!
all them spare cpu cycles would be better used for distributed research like Folding@Home and other @home projects
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Wikia is a for-profit company. Users running portions of their crawler should be paid. At least in stock of the company. Otherwise it's a ripoff. It's reminiscent of Kazaa's approach to "peer to peer": user machines do the work; Kazaa collects the money.
Distributing the web crawl isn't that big a win. The crawl is a batch job, but replying to search requests is a near real time application. The expensive part of a search engine is the system that generates fast search responses. That's where you need the systems with gigabytes of RAM and tight coupling to the other machines of the cluster.
Doing the web crawl on user machines offloads some of the effort, but not all that much of it. If you want to cut crawl costs, some of the query machines can be devoted to crawling during slow periods.
Remember, you can't trust the client. Web spammers can modify their copies of the crawler to report extra, phony links to their web sites and boost their stats. This gives a whole new meaning to the term "link farming". Until Wikia, there was no easy way for "search engine optimization" types to mess with the internals of the search engine. Now there is.
Besides, what's the selling point? "Our search costs less to use than Google?" Hello?
Oh, great, so we get to extend the now-infamous Wiki popularity club to searches.
"I've spent my whole life figuring out crazy ways to do things. It'll work." -- Montgomery Scott, "Relics"
Yes, but in what form are you planning to release it?
Wikia has aquired the Grub sourcecode from LookSmart. We will be posting the complete, current codebase as soon as possible, here on Grub.org. In the meantime, signup and stay tuned to developments regarding getting Grub going again.
Translation: Development had slowed to a SNAIL's pace(*), but now casting off its SHELL, we bring you a new and improved (TM) GRUB!
(*) From: Member Statistics (as of 20070730 at 14:47 EDT)
Let's see here:
38.3737 YEARS!I hope they are successful so I can witness a fair fight to the death between man (Wikia) and machine (Google). My bet is machine.
Don't be crazy anymore!
... well, I'z jus' sayin'
It's faster, lighter, doesn't require a gazillion support files and is easy to configure. It's also dead, but that's never stopped Elvis from having an active career at the supermarket.
How does this compare to http://www.yacy.net/yacy/ ?
i would rather see 100,000 servers in a datacenter "google style" dedicated to number crunching with operating systems and hardware tuned for servers and efficiency rather than 1,000,000 home pcs wasting away electricity and bandwidth
or at least have them home pcs doing something usefull like folding proteins or other distributed medical projects that will help people
the world doesnt need Yet Another Search Engine
google, live and yahoo do a great job already
I think you should all go vote for my girlfriend in this contest: [URL="http://www.thegiantdream.com/Profile.php?ID= 21"]http://www.thegiantdream.com/Profile.php?ID=21 [/URL]
kinda NSFW ... bikini !
Its lagit im just trying to help her win, i know u all think its spam or trollign or whatever, give me a break tho and help her out !
Thanks
They are completely separate entities. The only relationship is that Wikipedia's founder, Jimmy Wales, started this venture with Angela Beesley, a former member of the Wikimedia Foundation board of directors.
There is some synergy, partly because of the fact that Jimmy Wales runs Wikia and sort-of runs Wikimedia, partly because Wikia needs community goodwill to succeed, and partly because Wikia uses the MediaWiki software on its own servers so has an interest in it working well. However it isn't anywhere near as close a relationship as you described.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I'm the guy that started Grub back in 1999. In 2003, after getting a little bit of press, I sold the company to LookSmart. I was hoping for a continuation of the OS license for Grub, and the financial backing of a larger company that could help develop the product out to it's logical conclusion - distributed, open search.
Unfortunately that didn't happen with the situation, and I decided to move on to other opportunities. Now here I am again, and I fully support what Wikia is doing with Grub, and what their resources can do for the project and the problem it can solve.
Myself (Kord Campbell), Igor Stojanovski and Ledio Ago (both who work at Splunk BTW) are three original founders of Grub. We are now helping Wikia out with getting it up and running, and explaining how things work (or don't) and will continue spending a bit of time helping out where we can as the project matures.
I would like to point out that Grub itself isn't all that interesting right now. About all it does is distribute jobs that consist of URLs to crawl. Yes, something similar could be done with BOINK. Yes, nothing is being done with the crawled data. Yes, it breaks occasionally and it's full of bugs.
However, it's a start. It's the first pass at fully distributing the job of search, and putting it where it belongs - in the commons. Search doesn't belong to Google, or Wikia, it belongs to everyone. It's your data, and it should be your search engine crawling, indexing and searching that data - not some monolithic profit hungry company.
Go and read the page on search over at Wikia: http://search.wikia.com/ - Jer Miller (worked on Jabber) explains what they have in mind for Atlas. It's a fully distributed, OS, open protocol dream of making better search. Like Wikipedia (which is non-profit), Jimmy Wales wants search to be open, and community driven/managed - it's not about making gobs of money off your CPU/Bandwidth - it's about making better search for everyone.
Ideally the current Grub clients/server will go away, and be replaced with something better. For now, you have to crawl before you walk, and you have to walk before you run. Given time, and support from the OS community, I'm sure Wikia will do the right thing here.
If you want to get involved and help out, start by hitting the wiki and contributing your thoughts. We are going to need coders working on different aspects of the project as well, so think about volunteering in your particular area of expertise.
OK, I voted for her, but she lists her legs as her best feature, so now we need some leg pics! Micromini and some heels wouldn't hurt....
BTW, WTG! having a GF that cute
Am I the only one who thought.. Wow! I thought GRUB was already open source. I mean, it ships with so many Linux distros.
;)
Although I'm old school and I still use LILO.
I wonder if Wikia will have controls over their search terms? What will "Wikipedia admin real name" turn up?
Dude, where's my packet?
In all honesty, del.icio.us is a better search engine than what Google and other algorithmical engines ever hope to be.
Using "spare" computer cycles costs money. Hook up a power meter to your computer and check it out. My computer uses more than 50 extra watts during computation intensive tasks (not even graphics) than when the processor is idle. At 20 hours a day of extra processing cycles (if you would normally have your computer on but processor idle during those times) at 10 cents per kilowatt hour would be just about 10 cents per day, or $3 a month added to your electric bill. It would probably be more efficient for people to donate that money to Wikia so they can buy their own efficient servers, mine wastes a lot of energy on the power supply and hard drives for instance. The bandwidth might count for something also, but there are extra trips to deliver information back to Wikia also...
Given that Grub is Gnu-branded, and Debian installs it *by default*, I was practically certain that it was open-source already (though I don't happen to actually _know_ which license, though since it's Gnu-branded I bet I could venture a guess...) and maintained by the FSF. Now here we have Wikia acquiring Grub and releasing it under an open-source license. Must be a different Grub, but that still leaves room for lots of confusion.
What I want to know is, will Grub be released under the *same* open-source license as is used for Grub, or a different one? I could just about break out into an Abbott and Costello parody with this question...
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Grub is a boot loader not a search tool...
You've got your wires crossed again...
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