Open Source Search Engine
IT Manager's Journal | Why the future of search may be open source
"With Google rumored to be on the eve of a $4 billion IPO, Web search technology is attracting a lot of attention from technologists and business people alike. Doug Cutting, president of open source search software project Nutch.org thinks he has the next big thing in search: open source."
"Such an engine would allow users to see if there was bias in commercial search engines by comparing results against a known and open standard. Searches that favored paid advertisers, or political influence would show up easily. "Clean" search engines would benefit from such a service, in Cutting's opinion. A January 2003 Wired article cited Harvard research that showed Google had begun self-censoring content deemed inflammatory by a number of governments. Google declined to comment on the Wired allegations.
Nutch, like Linux, would essentially be a clone of "the other guys" but would be open, and would hopefully offer the same incremental improvement seen in projects like Apache."