By Tyler Huston
There have been many significant changes to the face of searchover the last several years with engines becoming moreintelligent than ever before. Today's users expect mainly fast,easy, relevant and satisfactory search results. In response tothis search engines have responded by giving users more controlover search results than ever through the emergence ofalternative search engines.
One instance of these so-called alternative search engines goesby the name of Nutch. Nutchis a two-year-old open source project, which has been hostedpreviously at Soundforge and backed by a non-profitorganization. Since then it has been determined that the Apachelicense is the most appropriate, with Nutch no longer requiringthe overhead of an independent non-profit organization. Theboard of directors and the developers both were in favor of themove to the Apache Foundation.
Nutch builds on Lucene technology, which was developed underthe watchful eye of Doug Cutting, the primary developer for bothof these open source projects. Doug has been working in thefield for almost two decades and has spent three years at Apple,four years at Excite as well as 5 years at Xerox PARC, so it issafe to say that Doug definitely knows his stuff. Lucene issuitable for nearly any application that requires full-textsearch, especially cross-platform. It is a full-featured,high-performance, text search engine library, coded entirely inJava to implement web search. Nutch is an application; you candownload it and run it. It adds a crawler and other web-specificstuff to Lucene as well as it's very own search algorithm and alink analysis module. Nutch aims to search the entire web likeGoogle or Yahoo! but has a few tricks up its sleeve thanks tothe beauty of open source licensing.
I recently had the privilege to interview Mel Strocen, the CEOof Jayde Online, Inc., oneof the Web's major online publication and search companies. Melhad some
very exciting news to report on how Jayde is planning toutilize the Nutch application.
Jayde has been developing a customized version of Nutch for thelast eight months and is planning to launch a search enginebased on the Nutch technology within the next few weeks. Theinitial beta version will consist of a network of dedicatedservers with an index of between 20 and 30 million websitelistings.
The real potential of this new search engine, and others usingthe Nutch technology, lies in the fact that it is open sourceand uses a "Plug-In Architecture". What this means is that theengine will be perpetually evolving and constantly improving tobetter facilitate the needs of searchers. One terrific examplethat shows us just how beneficial this type of open sourceplug-in technology can be is the
FireFox, in its short existence has eaten up a significantportion of the once all mighty Internet Explorer's market share.The popularity of this browser is due to the fact that it isconstantly making itself smarter. You can now find a plug-in forvirtually anything that you require , ranging from webdeveloper, downloading, and search tools to privacy, security,website integration and humorous plug-ins. You name it, there isan extension for it. The extension library consists of nearlysix hundred different plug-ins and is growing daily thanks tothe help of contributors everywhere.
Now just imagine implementing this type of plug-in technologyto a search engine, with one type of plug-in for say searchingMP3s and another plug-in for downloading PDFs. The possibilitiesof this new open source search technology are infinite. Now theterm "open-source search engine" may make a lot of people'sminds wander towards the idea of Black Hat search engineoptimization. The primary developer of Nutch, Doug Cutting,feels that the closed-source advantage is not nearly as much ofa factor as one might imagine it to be. The fact that the searchengine is open-source allows sp@mmers to be detected far fasterthan that of closed-source search engines latest sp@m detectingalgorithms. Either way, you know that the sp@mmers willeventually figure out how it works, the only difference is howquickly. So the top anti-sp@m techniques, closed or open source,are those that continue to function even when their mechanism isknown.
Another type of alternative search engine technology has justrecently been released to beta version is "
Relevancy Rank is a combination of personalization,localization, time spent at any one site, click through rates aswell as conversions. These are all taken into account to providethe most relevant results. "For an example, if you happened tobe a zoologist who loved to search for different animals andinformation relating to animals and you entered the word"Jaguar" you would be returned far different results from say acar enthusiast who searched frequently for different types ofvehicles and also typed in the word "Jaguar"", noted Scott.Relevancy Rank helps to provide you with the most relevantresults based on your previous search behavior.
With the end users expectations continuing to grow, these twistson the way that results are gathered and displayed are anenormous help in satisfying the user's hunger to get to theresults that they are looking for. I am quite anxious to see howthese new forms of search technology fair out over the nextseveral months. One thing is for sure, these new technologiesare sure to revolutionize the way that web search is conductedand pave a new path for the evolution of search.
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