Replace Google?

Fri Sep 12 12:03:30 GMT 2003 Replace Google?

Link:An Open Source Search Engine

You can find this at Nutch.org.

One thing that raised my eyebrows was the statement that "At this point Nutch is coded entirely in Java". That's just gotta be painful.

Maybe I've got blinders on, but I can't see non-commercial search working, just because I think it needs too much concentrated infrastructure. Google has all those little Linux boxes, and while they are cheaper than Windows Server 2003, they still cost money. I don't see how you can distribute that load to a bunch of volunteers, and I don't see how you could do this without oodles of little boxes cranking away. That could be my failure of imagination and vision, of course.

I can see that Google does have some problems. I've written about that before and I do agree with this writer that the closed nature of Google's page rank is a negative. There is room for competition here; I'm just not sure Open Source can pull this one off.

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