Aliweb

Is it coming back?

[glauber]

Does anybody here know about the status of Aliweb ( [aliweb.emnet.co.uk] )? It seems to be caught in a time-warp where it's always going to "be back in approximately one week"! :(

It seems to be such a cool concept.

g

[NFFC]

I'll ask them for you they are very local to me.

[glauber]

Still down:

Apologies this service us currently unavailable

it should be back in approximately one week.

EMNET Webmaster

:(

[mattaldridge]

I work for EMNET, who have the code for the original Aliweb after it was passed to us by Nexor. Aliweb was written by Martijn Koster in his spare time while he was at Nexor, and it hasn't really had any work done to it for many years. We had hoped to find the time to develop it but I'm afraid it sank to the bottom of the list.

It doesn't support HTTP/1.1 virtual hosting at all, so isn't really of any use at the moment. It also is very inefficient in its storage, creating three file system folders for each site that is registered with it!

Note that there is a newly developed version of it running at www.aliweb.com which is nothing to do with us, they have rewritten the engine from scratch and are operating it independantly as far as I know (although the last I heard from them was years ago).

We may be interested in opening up development of it to the public domain under the GPL if there is any interest in it, but apart from that I doubt much will happen with it unless one of our developers plays with it after hours.

Anyway, thanks for your interest, please let me know if you'd like any more information,

Matt. (EMNET Network Manager).

[glauber]

Thanks for the info!

The funny thing about www.aliweb.com is that, when you try to register a site, it sends you right back to EMNET. Search works there, but i wonder if they're searching some old index.

g

[mattaldridge]

Hmm, yes I guess that they never got around to writing their own robot, the way the mirrors used to work was that they would FTP the latest database file from Nexor once a week or so, but now that the Nexor site and Aliweb are separated I doubt that the file even exists on Nexor's FTP service.

If they have given up on developing it maybe it would be interesting to get some sort of open source development going. If anyone is interested please let us know.

Matt.

[NFFC]

Hi Matt thanks for taking the time to stop by, appreciated.

Slightly OT, but how is your East Midlands Search Engine [search.eastmidlands.net] doing, your input in this thread Lets talk Vortals the future and value of specialized search [webmasterworld.com] would be welcome.

[mattaldridge]

www.eastmidlands.net is going very well thanks, we have lots of plans for improving it in many ways. I'll have a look at the thread you mention.

Matt.

[NFFC]

For anyone interested the original Aliweb paper is available:

ALIWEB - Archie-Like Indexing in the WEB [info.webcrawler.com]