Welcome to the OpenZuka distributed open source search project
Distributed open source search built around the values of diversity, empowerment, fairness and transparency, with infrastructure maintained as necessary by not-for-profit, open, and democratic groups.
Because finding and organizing information should not be left solely to private algorithms.
Contribute to our knowledge base.
So enthused that you don't want to read more before offering your computer science Ph.D. or checkbook to us? Write us through our web form.
Opening Statement by Mitchell Szczepanczyk
Posted August 4th, 2007 by Mitchell Szczep...[Copied from OpenZuka's defunct phpBB forum - BM]
The idea behind openzuka was probably best articulated by Benjamin:
Which search engines cache the pages they've crawled?
Posted July 31st, 2007 by Benjamin Melançon- Ask.com (Teoma) does cache, but very few of its pages
- Yahoo (Inktomi) caches
- MSN Live Search (also used by A9) for all practical purposes does not.
- Google does cache nearly everything
- AllTheWeb.com doesn't have a cache
- Altavista doesn't have a cache
Useful page page:
http://www.antezeta.com/search-engine-cache.html
Dangers of widespread proxy caching (which is distinct from caching for archive or index purposes):
http://www.isoc.org/oti/articles/0198/tewksbury.html
LookSmart
Posted July 31st, 2007 by Benjamin MelançonAd-heavy. Seems to like to return front pages rather than deep content. Does not appear to make cached pages available.
Grub
Posted July 31st, 2007 by subminAcquired by Wikia Search from LookSmart.
This project has all the right ideals, and was made open source again in 2007 July.
Search is part of the fundamental infrastructure of the Internet. And, it is currently broken.
Why is it broken? It is broken for the same reason that proprietary software is always broken: lack of freedom, lack of community, lack of accountability, lack of transparency. Here, we will start to change all that.
Search Wikia Labs
Posted July 31st, 2007 by Benjamin MelançonUpdate: Nick Lewis points out that Wikia's attempt to mix community-driven with for-privane-profit is likely to fail. Which is fine as OpenZuka's been planning on world domination all along. Steve Anderson noted the need for a nonprofit alternative months ago. Still, the key part of opening up algorithms, shared by OpenZuka, is worth keeping an eye on.
http://search.wikia.com/wiki/Search_Wikia
Building a new open global search engine.
AllTheWeb.com
Posted July 24th, 2007 by Benjamin MelançonAllTheWeb.com
Does not appear to have caches of indexed content available.
As of 2007 July 24, proclaimed to be experimenting with live search.
MyLiveSearch
Posted May 29th, 2007 by Benjamin MelançonMyLiveSearch is approaching it's public beta as of the end of May, 2007.
http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/news/technology/better-than-google-creat...
It works differently from other search engines is that it takes others' indexing as a starting point to do a live search of the Internet before returning results.
Interesting approach, and the article has a mention of Nutch's aggregation of indexes approach.
OpenZuka could borrow from both...
Wiki Inc. Search Engine
Posted May 26th, 2007 by Benjamin MelançonSteve Anderson (via e-mail) wrote:
the founders of wikipedia are developing a search engine:
http://www.reuters.com/article/internetNews/idUSL1964587420070420?pageNu...
I tried it in beta seems to work really well:
http://www.wikia.com/index.php?title=Special:Search&cx=00694622795176895...
UPDATE from ben: When I tried it it works well too, but it's using Google's custom search, not its own, for web searches: http://www.google.com/coop/cse/?hl=en
