Search Engines

The philosophy

Google’s algorithm is the goose that lays the golden egg but doesn’t cackle. Wales wants it to sqawk its head off
Wales thinks that search on the web is broken, for the same reason that proprietary software is broken: lack of freedom and accountability. He thinks that Google’s search algorithm is a form of “editorial control”; it is of course true that whilst Google has been a relatively good friend to free software and some open standards, they do nevertheless keep their search algorithm secret. It is the goose that lays the golden egg but doesn’t cackle. Wales wants it to squawk its head off. To that end he came up with Wikia. It is released under the GPL and the source code is free for all to examine and amend. Additionally, where search engines like Google rely on that algorithm to power searches, Wikia adds a human element to searching that positively encourages human input to build and extend the search engine. Wiki utilizes Nutch for its algorithm and Lucene for search; Wales also acquired Grub as an open source web crawler to index the web (and released the source code for it too).


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http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/columns/how_build_free_software_search_engine_and_use_it_too_welcome_wikia