Guardian UK article : "Let's Go Nutch..." - Rival To Google?

Article explores open-source project and general SE developments

[pjamescowie]

Forum members might be interested in reading the Schofield article in today's Guardian (21 August 2003):

[guardian.co.uk...]

[chiyo]

Good ideals,, competition is great. non-commercially influenced is great. transparancy is great.

But so is motherhood.

nothing to look at yet... so what do others know that I cant see from the nutch site? (not a rhetorical question) Guardian's citations are few and the sources are varied in credibility.

The one thing that set off alarm bells (from the nutch site)..

"..All existing major search engines have proprietary ranking formulas, and will not explain why a given page ranks as it does.... Nutch, on the other hand, has nothing to hide and no motive to bias its results.."

OK, so if everybody knows how to rank, how will they prevent people who may not have the "best sites" but invest a lot of getting theirs to the top of nutch results using nutch's transparant algos? There is no evidence from nutches site anyway that they have come up with an indexing and ranking system that is 100% resilient against spam and SEO.

finally how can this be funded? A lot of the early work for google's "free" index algos was done on university time, and later from VCs. And Ink and Fast also have fairly objective looking results fairly free from commercial influence despite PFI. What is the unique advantage that Nutch can give that will convince investors that it is better than google/ink/fast/ and maybe even gigablast/openfind and all the other "objective" ranking systems?

[valeyard]

Wow! I post a bedtime wish in another thread for an open source SE and when I wake up it's granted! WW really is powerful :-)

Seriously, let's analyse this article. Nutch doesn't exist yet, probably won't for ages. So the article actually says:

- Google is the de facto search engine standard
- Some people would like an alternative but there isn't one
- Be careful what you wish for ("If not Google, then who?")
- Danger Will Robinson: Microsoft alert

I doubt Google will be unhappy at this article.

Schofield has been around for years and I don't doubt his integrity.

In the wider world Google have had a lot of PR puffs disguised as news in the UK press recently. There was even an entire page on the BBC web site about how upset they are that their name is becoming synonymous with web searching. Yeah, right.

I think Google UK have hired some really smart Public Relations people.

[heini]

Since any press is good press this was good for Nutch. Everything else in that "article" is just a big nothing. It basically says: Long live Google. Thanks for that informed piece of journalism.

[John_Caius]

11 days later than WW...

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