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Wikia Acquires Grub, Releases it Under Open Source
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Mon Jul 30, 2007 01:37 PM
from the more-fodder-for-the-cannons dept.
from the more-fodder-for-the-cannons dept.
An anonymous reader writes "During a keynote address at the O'Reilly Open Source Conference (OSCON), Jimmy Wales announced that Wikia has acquired Grub, the original visionary distributed search project, from LookSmart and released it under an open source license for the first time in four years. Grub operates under a model of users donating their personal computing resources towards a common goal, and is available for download and testing."
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FIST SPORT (Score:5, Funny)
Re:FIST SPORT (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:FIST SPORT (Score:4, Insightful)
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Lunch Time (Score:5, Funny)
Release (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Release (Score:4, Funny)
[1] including several pamphlet with Rorschach-like art.
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Release (Score:5, Funny)
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Uh-oh? (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course at that point Google will buy Wikia and whatever other properties seem relevant... and then Google will have completed the transition from "do no evil" to "if you can't beat them, buy them" that started with YouTube.
Of course this might not be the case, but I have trouble trying to come up with a reason why Wikia might want something like Grub.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Not if you use smileys, it isn't! ;) ;) :)
So? (Score:2, Interesting)
\ I'll be excited if they make a working search engine. I'll be even more excited if they do work on the searching algorithms, which is what makes or breaks search engines
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vi?
If you can use a boot loader I would think a flat file editor would be a big advancement.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
So you're saying it's not the size that matters, but how they use it.
Interesting. I'm sure I've heard this somewhere before...
Plans for BOINC? (Score:2)
I know BOINC isn't the end-all-be-all of distributed computing, but it seems they gathered a large following once Seti@home project moved there, especially with what I would newbies or laymen to distributed computing in general. It might seem a smart move considering th
wait a second (Score:5, Insightful)
so they want to use other peoples spare CPU cycles to build an empire on top without spending money on servers?
rofl!
all them spare cpu cycles would be better used for distributed research like Folding@Home and other @home projects
Re:wait a second (Score:5, Insightful)
So why is it so crazy to think that users would be willing to participate in a search engine where you "pay" with your spare CPU cycles? If the search engine generates useful results, it seems like a fair trade-off for me.
I'm not sure what Wikia's business model is here. It's probably not ads, since it would be difficult to reliably enforce and bill an ad-pushing system using software that is open-source and a network that is peer-to-peer. Probably they hope that this will drive more traffic to Wikia projects, or somesuch.
But, ultimately, I don't see what's so crazy about a for-profit company and end users coming to a mutually beneficial agreement. I donate CPU cycles and bandwidth, and get access to search results. Sounds fair to me. If the result is useful and the terms-of-use not onerous, most users will happily use it.
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Re:wait a second (Score:4, Informative)
There are way too many uses of "wiki" in that paragraph...
Anyhow, my point is that while it's a for-profit, it's still "for the public good" in a sense, since it exists to support non-profits, and thus it's not crazy to donate them CPU cycles.
Parent
it is not the for-profit arm of Wikimedia (Score:3, Informative)
There is some synergy, partly because of the fact that Jimmy Wales runs Wikia and sort-of runs Wikimedia, partly because Wikia needs community goodwill to succeed, and partly because Wikia uses the MediaWiki software on its own servers so has an interest in it working well. However it isn't anywhere nea
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Whatever you're doing is already covered pretty well by something already out there. See the foolishness of that statement?
Yes. The existing search engines do a pretty good job. However, I've been brainstorming lately to try and figure out what the next big thing will be for search engines (so I can buy a load of stock when something shows up that does this) and the thing I keep coming back to is context. When I search for Chaos Theory, am I looki
Interesting (Score:5, Funny)
- Fedora Core 7 (redirected from Red Hat)
- Microsoft Windows Vista (redirected from Longhorn)
- Microsoft Windows 98 Second Edition (redirected from Win98)
- FreeBSD 6.2
- MSDOS 5.11(redirected from DOS)
Use the up and down arrow keys to make a selection, press Enter to boot.[Note: This selection may be too technical for the average user. Please help revise to improve.]
[Note: This entry has been locked from new and anonymous users due to ongoing controversy. See also: WGA]
[Note: This OS requires cleanup to conform to quality standards. Please get involved.]
[Note: Link appears dead. This has been tagged since July, 2007]
[This operating system is a stub. Please help to expand and improve it. This entry has been tagged since 1981]
Is this a good thing? (Score:5, Interesting)
Wikia is a for-profit company. Users running portions of their crawler should be paid. At least in stock of the company. Otherwise it's a ripoff. It's reminiscent of Kazaa's approach to "peer to peer": user machines do the work; Kazaa collects the money.
Distributing the web crawl isn't that big a win. The crawl is a batch job, but replying to search requests is a near real time application. The expensive part of a search engine is the system that generates fast search responses. That's where you need the systems with gigabytes of RAM and tight coupling to the other machines of the cluster.
Doing the web crawl on user machines offloads some of the effort, but not all that much of it. If you want to cut crawl costs, some of the query machines can be devoted to crawling during slow periods.
Remember, you can't trust the client. Web spammers can modify their copies of the crawler to report extra, phony links to their web sites and boost their stats. This gives a whole new meaning to the term "link farming". Until Wikia, there was no easy way for "search engine optimization" types to mess with the internals of the search engine. Now there is.
Besides, what's the selling point? "Our search costs less to use than Google?" Hello?
Re:Is this a good thing? (Score:4, Insightful)
That's not the part the parent is comparing. The parent's comparison has NOTHING to do with the spyware issue. It has to do with using the "communities" resources to make money without paying for those resources. But hey, if *you* like to work for free, have at it.
Parent
Welcome Back Grubby (Score:5, Informative)
Unfortunately that didn't happen with the situation, and I decided to move on to other opportunities. Now here I am again, and I fully support what Wikia is doing with Grub, and what their resources can do for the project and the problem it can solve.
Myself (Kord Campbell), Igor Stojanovski and Ledio Ago (both who work at Splunk BTW) are three original founders of Grub. We are now helping Wikia out with getting it up and running, and explaining how things work (or don't) and will continue spending a bit of time helping out where we can as the project matures.
I would like to point out that Grub itself isn't all that interesting right now. About all it does is distribute jobs that consist of URLs to crawl. Yes, something similar could be done with BOINK. Yes, nothing is being done with the crawled data. Yes, it breaks occasionally and it's full of bugs.
However, it's a start. It's the first pass at fully distributing the job of search, and putting it where it belongs - in the commons. Search doesn't belong to Google, or Wikia, it belongs to everyone. It's your data, and it should be your search engine crawling, indexing and searching that data - not some monolithic profit hungry company.
Go and read the page on search over at Wikia: http://search.wikia.com/ [wikia.com] - Jer Miller (worked on Jabber) explains what they have in mind for Atlas. It's a fully distributed, OS, open protocol dream of making better search. Like Wikipedia (which is non-profit), Jimmy Wales wants search to be open, and community driven/managed - it's not about making gobs of money off your CPU/Bandwidth - it's about making better search for everyone.
Ideally the current Grub clients/server will go away, and be replaced with something better. For now, you have to crawl before you walk, and you have to walk before you run. Given time, and support from the OS community, I'm sure Wikia will do the right thing here.
If you want to get involved and help out, start by hitting the wiki and contributing your thoughts. We are going to need coders working on different aspects of the project as well, so think about volunteering in your particular area of expertise.
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