Slashdot Mirror
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!"
That's funny, I ALSO just acquired some grub, yum yum.
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.
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
- Fedora Core 7 (redirected from Red Hat)
- Microsoft Windows Vista (redirected from Longhorn)
- Microsoft Windows 98 Second Edition (redirected from Win98)
- FreeBSD 6.2
- MSDOS 5.11(redirected from DOS)
Use the up and down arrow keys to make a selection, press Enter to boot.[Note: This selection may be too technical for the average user. Please help revise to improve.]
[Note: This entry has been locked from new and anonymous users due to ongoing controversy. See also: WGA]
[Note: This OS requires cleanup to conform to quality standards. Please get involved.]
[Note: Link appears dead. This has been tagged since July, 2007]
[This operating system is a stub. Please help to expand and improve it. This entry has been tagged since 1981]
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?
Real men use Grub. Lilo is easier and limited. Surely not for real men.
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?
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.
This Grub seems to be a human-edited system not unlike Wikipedia. I'm much more interested in algorithmic search, which is why your YaCy link was most welcome :) Another distributed search I've come across is Majestic-12.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
The world doesn't need Yet Another Operating System
Whatever you're doing is already covered pretty well by something already out there. See the foolishness of that statement?
Yes. The existing search engines do a pretty good job. However, I've been brainstorming lately to try and figure out what the next big thing will be for search engines (so I can buy a load of stock when something shows up that does this) and the thing I keep coming back to is context. When I search for Chaos Theory, am I looking for Ian Malcolm or Sam Fisher? When I search for Errant, am I looking for sites where a friend of mine used that as his username, am I looking for a dictionary, am I looking for knights errant? This is the biggest thing that hasn't happened to search engines yet without using a bunch of clunky boolean expressions. Wikipedia et al are built for this. Searches that have a bunch of different things for the same terms hit a disambiguation page. This lets you tell the system if you care about a movie, a band, a person, or any number of other things that your search term might be referring to. I eagerly await what this will bring.
I see your informative link, and raise you a pithy comment.