Who remembers Grub? (distributed search crawler)

[Dimitri]

For some reason, today, I've been thinking about Grub, may be I, incongruously, linked it to the new Brave Search, I don't know.

Who remembers it? (You need to be 40+)

I did install it, and I was feeling excited about it. However, I do not remember how long I participated to the crawling. Back to that time, I had only a RTC connection, at 56K, so I certainly didn't contribute a lot :D

I see it was acquired by Lookmsart [webmasterworld.com...] , for $1.3 millions in 2003, then by Wikia [webmasterworld.com...] for $50,000 in 2007.

[iamlost]

No memory of it whatsoever... your WebmasterWorld links were a fun read though :)

Yet another example of software depreciation...

[jmccormac]

Yep. It became the basis for the Wikia Search engine index crawler. It was a classic "other people's bandwith/CPU cycles" crawler. The problem was that even by the time that Wikia bought it, the Infinite Monkeys model of following links to find new websites was dead and millions of .COM domain names were being added to the zones and deleted again a few days later. The Wikia Search operation had some good people but no it had no expertise in rapidly building a search index or dealing with the spam problem. It would have been discussed in the Alternative Search Engines forum here on WW.

Regards...jmcc