Nutch

open source search engine

[volatilegx]

Any comments on the feasibility of an open source search engine?

I personally believe it would be too easy to game an open source engine and their index will be full of spam.

Quoted from their FAQ:

Search engines work hard to construct ranking algorithms that are immune to manipulation. Search engine optimizers still manage to reverse-engineer the ranking algorithms used by search engines, and improve the ranking of their pages. For example, many sites use link farms to manipulate search engines' link-based ranking algorithms, and search engines retaliate by improving their link-based algorithms to neutralize the effect of link farms.

With an open-source search engine, this will still happen, just out in the open. This is analagous to encryption and virus protection software. In the long term, making such algorithms open source makes them stronger, as more people can examine the source code to find flaws and suggest improvements. Thus we believe that an open source search engine has the potential to better resist manipulation of its rankings.

Check them out at http: //www.nutch.org/

[epptom]

It's interesting that Overture has their hands in the project. Since Overture is contributing money to the project, I wonder what the license to download and use will be?

As far as it being open source, I wouldn't worry *too* much about spammers - a good example of Open Source versus spammers is the email spam filter "SpamAssassin" which is open source and widely used to kill inbox spam. To my knowledge, spammers haven't found a way around their algorithm. ;-)

[mack]

Currently the release is still GPL. Don't think this will change with the overture influince.

The project all in all looks pretty cool. Will be interesting to see some se's emerge using the software.

Mack.

[sidyadav]

Nutch has been discussed a lot of times at WebmasterWorld...
[google.com ]

Any comments on the feasibility of an open source search engine?

[webmasterworld.com...]

Sid