An open-source search engine

Nutch is a nascent, open-source effort to keep Google and other commercial search engines honest.

"Nutch provides a transparent alternative to commercial web search engines. Only open source search results can be fully trusted to be without bias. (Or at least their bias is public.) All existing major search engines have proprietary ranking formulas, and will not explain why a given page ranks as it does. Additionally, some search engines determine which sites to index based on payments, rather than on the merits of the sites themselves. Nutch, on the other hand, has nothing to hide and no motive to bias its results or its crawler in any way other than to try to give each user the best results possible."

More specifically, Nutch's authors want to build software that will let anyone (with a large enough hard drive and a big enough 'Net pipe, that is): "fetch several billion pages per month; maintain an index of these pages; search that index up to 1000 times per second; provide very high quality search results; operate at minimal cost."

Via Scripting News.