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Nutch - an open source Google rival?
Although web search is one of the most important requirements
for Internet navigation, the number of search engines is decreasing.
More and more search engines are closing their doors and those
that remain merge or have close relationships.
All existing major search engines have proprietary ranking
formulas and they do not explain why a certain web page ranks
as it does. Search engine results are often biased and some
search engines determine which sites to index based on payments
rather than the merits of the sites themselves.
Even Google has a tendency to prefer
commercial shopping listings and they ban web sites they don't
like from their index.
Today's search engine oligopoly could soon be a monopoly
and a single search engine company would control nearly all
web searches for its commercial gain. That would not be good
for Internet users and webmasters.
That's where Nutch comes in. Nutch is a nascent effort to
implement an open-source web search engine.
Nutch aims to provide a transparent alternative to commercial
web search engines on an open source basis. Its idea is that
only open source search results can be fully trusted to be
without bias.
"All of the existing search engines have secret methods
for deciding which documents are the best documents,"
said lead architect Doug Cutting, "Search is something
that's a basic need for users of the Internet. People have
the right to know how their search engine works, so they can
trust it."
Nutch wants to promote public access to search technology
without commercial bias by providing free high-quality search
software and its source code to the public and by facilitating
ongoing research and development of search technology in a
public forum.
A public demo isn't available yet but the idea behind this
project looks very promising. The Nutch board of directors
includes popular people like Tim O'Reilly (O'Reilly computer
books), Peter Savich (Overture research) and Mitchell Kapor
(co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation).
If Nutch succeeded, web surfers and webmasters would benefit
from unbiased search results and more choice. That would definitely
help improving the quality of the search results.
If you want to find out more about Nutch or if you want to
support this new project, visit http://www.nutch.org/docs/faq.html.
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