Wikia Acquires Grub, Releases it Under Open Source

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."

Uh-oh?

[dedazo]

This might be bad news for Google. WP is about the only "organization" capable of putting together a human-vetted search with the Grub software. I have no idea of people will go for that sort of thing (I like my search results from an algorithm, thanks) but if they do, and the search results work correctly (that relevance is what made Google to begin with) then Google might just be in trouble.

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.

wait a second

[wwmedia]

WIKIA is a for profit company!

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:Meh...

[Anonymous Coward]

Real men use Grub. Lilo is easier and limited. Surely not for real men.

I, for one, welcome our new Wiki overlords

[Lord of Hyphens]

Oh, great, so we get to extend the now-infamous Wiki popularity club to searches.

Re:wait a second

[kebes]

I use Google search, which is produced by Google Inc., a for-profit company. I use the search "for free," but then again I "pay" with my eyeballs, since the search pages have ads. This is a trade-off that I (and many others) are willing to make.

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.

Re:FIST SPORT

[Ltar]

How do you expect him to get first post if he reads the summary?

Re:Is this a good thing?

[Frosty Piss]

kquote>Comparing Kazaa to Wikia is rather over the top as Wikia doesn't install spyware and ad-serving crap. A bit of FUD?

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.

Re:somebody think of the environment!

[Torvaun]

The world doesn't need Yet Another Operating System

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 looking for Ian Malcolm or Sam Fisher? When I search for Errant, am I looking for sites where a friend of mine used that as his username, am I looking for a dictionary, am I looking for knights errant? This is the biggest thing that hasn't happened to search engines yet without using a bunch of clunky boolean expressions. Wikipedia et al are built for this. Searches that have a bunch of different things for the same terms hit a disambiguation page. This lets you tell the system if you care about a movie, a band, a person, or any number of other things that your search term might be referring to. I eagerly await what this will bring.