jtara - 6:24 pm on Dec 25, 2006 (gmt 0)

To take this in a bit of a different direction - Wales does mention in his blog the open-source software that the site will be built on - Apache Nutch and Lucene.

Nutch is a text search-engine library. Lucene uses Nutch to build a web crawler and search engine.

If nothing else, this project should insure good support and further development on these open-source projects.

Webmasters have few good options for search on their own sites. This should help insure that the Nutch/Lucene option is a viable one.

It should also foster the development of more competition in search. If Wales proves that Nutch/Lucene can be used for a full-scale web search engine, it should encourage others to give it a go with their own unique twist on search.