Altavista - Open Sourced UPDATED 155
Hi there,
The new affiliate program is based on a syndicated model, where we are providing the HTML and search box interface to Web sites, large and small to enable their users to access AltaVista's premier services including search, stock quotes, language translation, multimedia, news and discussion group content. Users can choose from an array of search boxes that fit their personal brand. The search box then acts as a gateway for users to tap into our robust index. Those Web sites that choose to participate inAltaVista's Affiliate Network will receive three cents per click-through when their users access AltaVista branded services. To learn more about the affiliate program visit http://doc.altavista.com/affiliate/.
This program is not to be confused with the other products we provide that do allow customers to access our source code and build their own search products. We provide an array of tools that allow customers to create their own customized engines and can be accessed at http://doc.altavista.com/business_solutions/search_products/search_intranet/ intranet_intro.shtml.
Oh boy. (Score:1)
kwsNI
Not Open Source (Score:3)
It would be great news if the source code would truly be GP-licensed or whatever OS license model Altavista would choose, but I doubt they will do that. Also remember that the search engine that you can obtain from Alta Vista is not the same as the one that's running their web site. It used to be downloadable before, and my information is that it does not scale as good as the AltaVista.com web page search engine does.
The ideal search engine (Score:1)
An evolving search engine.. cool! They need some way of continuously verifying links. I used to use Altavista when it first came out years ago but I quickly started getting large amounts of 404's. I've heard they've improved, but that seems to be a common problem with search engines. Maybe Open Source can fix that.
Oh, thank goodness... (Score:4)
Babe's love fishing (Score:3)
Give a man a babelfish, he understands for a day. GPL the babelfish, then embed it, and he gets a real cool palm app next year.
(Note: the letters GPL do not appear in the article, nor is app a real word)
Portals, schmortals (Score:1)
Do I hear ... [google.com]?
Open or semi-open? (Score:1)
Specs ... (Score:1)
I remember Altavista in 1995 was running on a machine with 4GB of memory.
Important stuff (Score:4)
Philosophically, it's a move away from the Marxist conception of value (which is paradoxically de rigeur in US business circles), where anything requiring work gained in value. This isn't obviously false, but false it is. Value, at least in the capitalist system, is based on the ability to sell at a profit. If you cannot sell at a profit, either using the technology or the technology itself, then it's valueless.
Most businessmen stick to the assumption that all the work put into this or that piece has made it valuable and worthy of protection. New businessmen are thinking it through - not everything that takes work is valuable, and protecting something valueless is a waste of effort. By open-sourcing the work, they turn a loss into a gain.
--
Re:The ideal search engine (Score:1)
Yeah, it would be nice if every URL always worked, but hey, it's the Internet.
Re:Babe's love fishing (Score:1)
Autonomy (Score:3)
Having said that, note that Alta Vista are keeping their actual database to themselves - this is the one real asset other than their brand which they possess. Taking these two together, we see a core competence (i.e. leveraging them provides a return disproportionate to effort in relation to the market sector), which is now the basis of their revenue plan.
Long time Altavista user? (Score:1)
Sorry, slightly OT - but I thought it was funny. BTW, altavista.digital.com still works.
kwsNI
Re:Oh boy. (Score:2)
Isn't Alta Vista on track to go public shortly? Without seeing their licensing terms, it's difficult to tell if this is a sincere move, or if it's just so they can be an "open source dot com". I guess we'll find out soon.
Not to be critical, because I've always wanted to have a commercial quality search engine, but Alta Vista's pretty advanced and just about the fastest search engine on the internet. What are they looking to gain by doing this? They don't need more developers, unless they're looking at laying off their team in hopes of the community shouldering the development effort for them.
And lastly, I doubt that they'll go with the GPL. No major vendor that's released their core product as opensource has had the guts to go fully to the GPL. But then I guess AltaVista's quite different than an operating system or application, as in it will still take years and millions of dollars for anyone to catch up with them in terms of eyeballs, which is where their money comes from these days...
Maybe slashdot could start a search engine though. Just a privatized one, picking up things like story links, member home pages, resume's etc... It could open some possibilities, but I still can't see how any of them would benefit alta vista.
Share raw search data across search engines? (Score:1)
(you want to download every single file
in the [venona.com]
Cypherpunks Archives? That's about 100k and
growing!), and how similar a lot of what they're
doing is, it would be really nice if the search
engines banded together and shared their raw data
over a private extranet, rather than every single
spider anyone with a spare PC decides to run
pillaging my website in turn. It's not such
a big deal for a well connected site like mine,
but for people on the end of a 9.6kbps link in
the developing world, search engine hits can
impose a high burden, but one which must be
borne to have one's content searchable.
The sites could still differentiate themselves
in spider technology by using their own custom
formats, analysis, etc., but ideally, whenever
one downloaded a page via http from an end-user
server, it would be available to the other
search engines automatically over private, high
speed links. By doing this, they'd all be able
to update more frequently, yet reduce overall
load on the net as a whole.
I suspect this will be more of a problem, not
less one one, in the future, and despite
the pitched competition in the search engine
industry, it'd be nice to see them work together
to improve the quality of the net as a whole.
After all, it's not a zero sum game!
Re:The ideal search engine (Score:2)
My $0.02
Re:Not Open Source (Score:1)
Besides it's just neat that more and more big names are doing things like this. Sure there's a lot of open source software, and a lot of companies and organizations making more programs that way every day. But this is impressive in that it's an every-day name. I dont know anyone who is tech-oriented enough to turn the computer *on* who hasn't heard of Altavista. So teh fact it's becoming more 'mainstream' is definately something...
Not open sourced... (Score:5)
I think the journalist in the above article has got it all wrong. I can't see anything on the Altavista site regarding the source being opened up.
What they are doing, however, is running an affiliate program that pays web site owners a commission (3c per click through, in this case) for each user that is referred to one of the various AltaVista search facilities from another web page (that has applied, and been approved, for this program).
This is not anything particularly new - as it happens, GoTo.com has been running a very similar scheme for quite a while. GoTo.com's program, as well as AltaVista's, is managed by befree.net.
So, you sign up, put the search boxes on your site, typically pointing to a unique url so they can track your referals, and start collecting money. You don't host their search engine - merely point to it.
If, on the other hand, i've missed something, I would appreciate any pointers to the actual AltaVista source code.
...j
Dynamic/Database content vs. Search Engines (Score:2)
realize, as well as cache companies like
Inktomi and Akamai, is that the Internet is
becoming increasingly dynamically-generated,
personalized, and transactional -- exactly the
kind of content least suited for static
spider-driven search engines and static cache
technology.
Perhaps this will be the first Internet
subcategory to fall from vastly overinflated
stock valuations due to technical change.
Actually (Score:3)
The article actually doesn't expand on the source code freedom beyond the mention in the title, which is more than a little frustrating.
This is like giving away freebies at a gas station (Score:2)
Yours truly,
Mr. X
The actual database? (Score:1)
It would be great news if the source code would truly be GP-licensed or whatever OS license model Altavista would choose, but I doubt they will do that. Also remember that the search engine that you can obtain from Alta Vista is
not the same as the one that's running their web site. It used to be downloadable before, and my information is that it does not scale as good as the AltaVista.com web page search engine does.
Another little piece of info regarding the use of a search engine. Basically you need a large ammount of disk space (on the order of terabytes) to actually get a search engine up and running. You need that database or else when I want to look at ancient Zulu fingernail clippings I will not find them in your search engine. This really will not empower many people to do anything special at all.
It's all about bandwidth. (Score:1)
Some links (and download) (Score:2)
Here [altavista.com] is the press release from Altavista.
'HTML code' (Score:2)
The Altavista Affiliate Program Agreement [altavista.com] states:
(Italics added for emphasis.)
I don't really see how Altavista giving people some HTML source - no matter how "proprietary" - counts as them opening their source code to their search engine, which seems to be what the article is trying to imply. Many other sites - Lycos, for one - have had similar programs in the past, though the $0.03 per clickthrough sounds like a different twist.
Chalk it up as effective marketing - they put the words "open" and "source" in the same sentence, and managed to generate the expected amount of talk about what is essentially a non-event. 'Course, I may have missed the "Download Altavista search engine source here!" link on their site, but I don't think so :-)
Re:Portals, schmortals (Score:1)
Altavista is deffinatly one of my favorite search's but if anybody messes with my google, i'll have to lay the smack down
Gentleman, you can't fight in here, this is the war room..
Re:Specs ... (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
And the URLs are: (Score:4)
T&C's, FAQs, etc., can be found at the second URL.
...j
couldn't find any links to the code... (Score:2)
...and here is why: "To join the 'network,' a site must demonstrate that it is a valid, working Web site that is updated on an ongoing basis."
but... "AltaVista plans to target the owners of personal home pages in the future." so maybe there is hope that they will start releasing the code to the rest of us soon.
Re: (Score:1)
what about doubleclick? (Score:2)
Seriously, tho, I'll believe this has happened when I have code in hand running on my intranet, without co-branding or marketing.
Kickass (Score:1)
to hell with my 'karma', mod this illiterate down (Score:2)
"The portal will begin giving away the source code for its search engine..."
Th above part says: they will give away source code.
Now for the AND part (that means they will be doing both things).
"
This part, with refrences to other parts of the article, is the part about who gets to be PAID. Noplace in the article does it say you have to be "worthy" in some way to get the source code.
And this tripe gets a score of 3?
Sounds like an idea for an open source project.... (Score:1)
Sounds liek an idea for an open source project -- a distributed search engine. Each node indexes a small part of the net and shares the results with every node that requests it... then all we need is a few high volume portals to direct requests to the various member nodes (taking into account their relative speed and balancing the load) and we've got one potentially big, reliable, and fast search engine.
Any takers?
-- WhiskeyJack
Murphys laws of Slashdot #3 (Score:2)
Sigh... Pecavi
New Definition of "Open Source" Lures Thousands (Score:5)
UPDATED February 1, 2000
In a shameless attempt to gain attention from popular news sites that will post any story that includes the phrase "Open Source," internet portal site AltaVista announced that it will begin giving away the source code to it's search engine while actually doing no such thing.
Today Altavista rolled out an affiliate program which "allows" web sites to include html that links to the altavista search engine. Altavista did not address the question of why this is interesting, when people have been including search engine textboxes on their pages since 1994. Instead they prominently featured the phrase "Open Source" in the press release title, and went on to not mention even once how "allowing users to include html" could be interpreted as "releasing the source code to it's search engine."
You may still download a crippled trial version of Altavista's intranet search tools, which you may uncripple for a registration fee. But the bold maneuver of issuing a press release that uses the words "open source" is taking the internet by storm.
"We see this press release as an unprecedented opportunity to leverage traffic from weblogs that don't do even the most rudimentary fact-checking," said an Altavista spokesman. "And we know for a fact that there are some very high traffic sites which auto-post any press release that uses the words 'open source,' without a human editor even being involved."
The perl scripts which post content at the popular computer news site Slashdot declined to comment on the allegations that no human is involved in story posting anymore, saying only, "It looks like a hole in the GNU GPL [may allow] people to practically turn GNU-free software into proprietary software..."
----------------
Note: This is intended mostly to be a flame at altavista, and to mildly poke fun at slashdot. Please take it for the humor it is. Thanks.
--The Mgmt.
----------------
Wish you could moderate the submission queue?
Re:Babes love fishing (Score:1)
Search Engine Use (Score:2)
For people like me, who are the vast majority of people who want to use the alta vista search engine, the open sourcing of the product (if they will be open sourcing it) is terrific news.
Re:Babes love fishing (Score:1)
I don't think that's right. A fraction of (since I do speak basically only English and it is my native tongue) refers to a part of. I have never heard that it means less than zero anywhere. Plus anything less than zero is negative and there are not many ways you can have negative quantities in terms of something like a dictionary unless the dictionary had a method of erasing memory engrams.
Applications of Distributed computing...Search? (Score:1)
chimchim.
Re:Search Engine Use (Score:1)
financial services companies. Part of the work involves receiving large feeds of stories from various sources, and our customers want to do free text searches on those stories. We use oracle for our main database, but oracle is very bad at
solving this particular problem, so we need to use another database (such as the alta vista search engine) to do the text indexing.
So your saying that essentially the main function that this particular things was created for will not be used? Also that most of the things released under the GPL and various other liscences are usually associated with business applications? I am sorry but a great deal of the "practal" applications seem frightfully dull. Is there a way that a truly interesting use of this search engine can be utilized for something a little bit more relaxed such as say analyzing content on the web and creating a better series of topologigraphic maps of the internet? Now *that* would be cool. Transfering the data to an ascii environment would be even cooler.
Re:to hell with my 'karma', mod this illiterate do (Score:3)
With respect to being "worthy": I read the press release as stating that you will have to become an "Affiliate" before you get the source code; and for becoming an affiliate you have to present a web site you are running.
The press release is ambigious about this, so maybe I am wrong. (But if I am wrong: where is the download page for the source code?)
Re:Dynamic/Database content vs. Search Engines (Score:2)
That's where I think it would be a great idea to embed the spiders within people's browsers for this distributed search engine project. Of course you'd need to be able to set up a system to selectively not spider sites / pages (account info, etc.) but the idea is as you're accessing the info in the web database the HTML that pours out gets indexed and then sent to your upstream. A lot of database information stays put or changes very little, but it's hidden behind a search or an index of some kind (see my knowledgebase [mixdown.org] for an example). If you embedded the spider within the browser, you'd get the content without hammering sites and all is good.
Re:'HTML code' (Score:1)
That clause doesn't prevent you from modifying the code (barring the existence of a licensing agreement that does do that), it simply says if you choose to alter it, Altavista isn't going to pay you.
Frankly, I think that's a very fair "restriction," because it doesn't limit your freedom with the code (again, assuming nothing else limits it). You can fiddle and twiddle to your heart's content. Just don't expect to get paid for click-throughs.
Re:The ideal search engine (Score:1)
Here here! Now that is what I call an inovation. I can't tell you how many times this has saved me.
Re:Babe's love fishing (Score:1)
So I doubt AV could release that code, even if they wanted, they just licensed it.
Re:Rather offtopic, but (Score:2)
My little mistake seems to be a little /. bug too. I entered the url as href='http://www.google.com' but that came out as href="'http://www.google.com'"
That is: slashdot added the double quotes making me look really stupid. Next the script will automagically add "F1R57 P057" and Natalie Portman to the first five post on any subject :-)
that's just the same ZD story again (Score:1)
bumppo
Now we'll get even more Porn-site hits... (Score:1)
Re:'HTML code' (Score:1)
Boycot AltaVista! (Score:2)
If enough people refuse to use the AltaVista service, =and= let them know why, they may either be pushed into apologising or releasing =some= source, which is better than nothing at all.
Re:Sounds like an idea for an open source project. (Score:2)
What would be more useful is a cluster of machines, each having the whole database. You would have to update all machines every night, but you might gain something from this approach.
--
Mike Mangino Consultant, Analysts International
I know what they mean (Score:1)
I think the author you are quoting meant less than one, rather than less than zero.
When people say "I got it for a fraction of the retail cost!" they are implying that they got it for less than that normal cost, for example 1/2 price, when the litteral translation of "fraction" into most (?) languages would not nesseseryly imply this, but would mean any fraction - ie a number expressed as a/b, like 4/3 or 8/3. There are many numbers most accurately expressed as fractions.
I appologise for my spelling - ThadGood... (Score:1)
Re:Babes love fishing (Score:1)
The technical meaning of mathematical terms often has little to do with the standard English meaning of those words. Another good example of this is "imaginary" (as in "imaginary number). Many people (collegiate mathematics students among them) still believe that imaginary numbers are somehow less real (to use the standard English meaning) than real numbers, when in fact all complex numbers (pure imaginaries and reals included) are equally abstract.
Re:to hell with my 'karma', mod this illiterate do (Score:2)
Every appliction may have a different terms of agreement for how the source is handled. If anything, this is incentive to READ before you buy or mess with someone's source code. You should be reading the licensing anyways, but I know MS liks to put it inside shrink wrap before selling things.
Bad Mojo
finally, a damn press release (Score:5)
http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/00 0201/ca_altavis_1.html [yahoo.com]
Excerpt:
"The AltaVista Affiliate Network is leading the expansion of our
distinctive services throughout the Web, at a global scale," said
Rod Schrock, president and CEO of AltaVista Company. "This
program will effectively open source AltaVista Search and
translation services thereby extending our brand to the Internet
community."
Smug bastards.
bumppo
Re:to hell with my 'karma', mod this illiterate do (Score:3)
"Can't you read? From the article refrenced: ". Yeah, because we all know that ZDNet never makes mistakes or says untrue things, right?
Maybe you should go read the AltaVista press release. They don't say anything like "Here is our source code, and here is the license". They talk a lot about business solutions and how you can obtain a modified version of their search engine. In a 5 minute look around their site I wasn't able to see anything about what license they were planning to use, or even verify that the search engine they were allowing you to download was not in binary form.
I hope that ZDNet got their story right, but the way the said things I was expecting to see a press release from AltaVista saying "AltaVista open-sources search engine technology!". Not seeing that bothers me.
C'mon, you should know better than to accept at face value what you read in something at ZDNet without checking the source of the story.
Re: (Score:1)
Re:Search Engine Use (Score:1)
I was just pointing out that the release of the alta vista search engine would be Really Cool, b/c there are lots of uses for it that don't involve buying millions of dollars of machinery and setting up Yet Another Web Index. Your 'topologigraphic' map project just furthers my point.
Re:Oh boy. (Score:1)
How will it help open source development to look at a monolthic pile of code when no one part of it couldn't be written by any compedent programmer, many
Now if altavista started hosting open projects home pages and CVS that would be news wouldn't it? or am I just predicting the newest portal scam? sorry andover.net couldn't resist
Sparkes
*** www.linuxuk.co.uk relaunches 1 Mar 2000 ***
Re:to hell with my 'karma', mod this illiterate do (Score:2)
Is this really good?! (Score:1)
I don't understand this... (Score:1)
So why this click-thru service anyway? Isn't this just the last resort for porn webmasters and script kiddies? What exactly does this prove...that at the mention of the phrase "open source," people come running? This just doesn't make any sense to me.
Thoughts?
Re: Even less than that. (Score:2)
The article just got yanked.
If anyone read through the affiliate program materials, there is no mention of any source code. Just the program itself. You put code to reference the toold/search on Altavista's site, and get paid $3 per clickthrough! Not all that lucrative unless you have alot of traffic.
Re: A correction! Not $3. (Score:1)
Re:to hell with my 'karma', mod this illiterate do (Score:1)
BTW, ZDNET has apparently pulled the story already (no, not slashdotted, "page not found" and headline removed from ZDNET). I do not know where anybody saw the AltaVista press release saying you must be an affiliate to get the source, but it is not showing up here live.altavista.com [altavista.com], so I am just going from the articles that I have working links to.
You guys MAY be right, but I have yet to see ANYTHING saying that AltaVista requires affiliation acceptance to get a copy of the source.
What's the deal with personal home pages? (Score:2)
1) First, you have to have a personal home page which is regularly updated. I haven't updated my personal home page in quite a while- it was really just a very short exercise in HTML- but I still access it almost daily. I have links to Alta Vista and Deja.com which use the text-only interfaces. I use them all the time. It's here [usit.net] just in case anyone's interested. Does incrementing some web counter count as "regularly updated"?
2) For my personal home page, I was only allowed access to two scripts provided in my ISP's cgi-bin. If you wanted your own cgi-bin, you needed to buy a commercial account. How many other personal home pages have similar restrictions?
Even though I don't have anything worth indexing, I have to wonder just what Alta Vista's thinking with this.
Where to submit patches ?? (Score:1)
Re:finally, a damn press release (Score:1)
Re:Dynamic/Database content vs. Search Engines (Score:1)
WRONG (Score:2)
http://www.opensource.org/ [opensource.org]
Re:to hell with my 'karma', mod this illiterate do (Score:1)
Search Engine Spammers (Score:3)
As most of us know already, major search engines use a hush-hush set of algorithms to reduce the number of spam'd enteries. (text set in the same color as the page background, really small text, keyword stuffing, etc.) By releasing the source to their engine, isn't AltaVista bascially giving the thieves keys to the treasure chest?
----
Lots of RAM (Score:1)
Micro$oft(R) Windoze NT(TM)
(C) Copyright 1985-1996 Micro$oft Corp.
C:\>uptime
maybe I missed something (Score:2)
So where is it? I'm getting the feeling that somewhere along the line something didn't get translated.
Ummm... (Score:2)
What would be more useful is a cluster of machines, each having the whole database.
That was _exactly_ what I was proposing.
Each node indexes a subset of the web. It then passes on its local index to the other nodes that make up the cluster, so that each individual node can accumulate a copy of the master index. Search requests are then routed to the individual nodes based on how many requests each node is currently processing, how quickly they've been responding, etc, so that none of the disparate machines that make up the search cluster get overloaded with requests. And if one of the nodes is slow to respond, the portal could just resend the request to another available node.
Those that didn't want to host requests but still wanted to help with the effort could run spiders that index a small portion of the web and make that index available to the central cluster, thereby distributing the workload further (and allowing sites to index their local networks, forinstance, where they typically have higher speed connections, then dump the resulting index off to the cluster during offpeak hours). This allows local admins to index whatever portions of their site they want as often as they want just by setting up their webserver as an index-only node in the cluster. Get enough sites doing that, and you're going to get pretty up to date results.
The indexes would only get passed on to the nodes that request them...with a little effort, it wouldn't be hard to set up request routes to allow indexes to flow from node to node via the fastest network connections possible, minimizing crosstalk between nodes (you just pass any downstream indexes upstream and vice-versa, adding in your own locally aquired index along the way) -- have the indexes propigate like news articles.
The portal machine would only need to maintain a list of IP addresses weighted according to how big a load each site is willing and able to handle, so its processor load will be minimal. Put a moderate-sized machine on the end of a big network pipe, and a few thousand nodes scattered all over the net, and you might have one nice search engine.
Sorry if my previous post confused you.
-- WhiskeyJack
ZDNet removed the story! (Score:1)
Link to story on Altavista (Score:2)
http://live.altavista.com/scripts/editorial.dll?ca tegoryid=&only=y&bfromind=980&eetype=art icle&render=y&eeid=1461716&avr=1
Re:It's all about bandwidth. (Score:2)
Well what would be really cool is if the engine could somehow detect a bad link as soon as a visitor fails to access it.. then the server double checks it the next day, and if it's still down, then POOF the link gets munched.
The point is to get some sort of real time checking and self monitoring. I've worked on numerous search engines, and most of them just have a batch verify command to parse the entire link database... there are better ways out there.
Re:Dynamic/Database content vs. Search Engines (Score:2)
10 for minutes=1 to ((day-sleep)*60*60) step 1
20 if x%2=0 goto 50
30 if x%9=0 goto 60
40 next x
45 end
50 reload(slashdot); next x
60 post(troll, 100, "Natalie Portman", "Grits", "Pants")
70 next x
You'd only ever see
Re:Rather offtopic, but (Score:1)
Re:Good... (Score:2)
http://www.altavista.com/cgi-bin/query?opt=on&e
Text only search - no ads or other BS...
Later
Re:I know what they mean (Score:1)
Yes, fraction means "any rational number". For that matter, it may be 1/1.
Having done some AV development.... (Score:1)
Regards, Barrie
Open Source the database (Score:1)
Since I often search via Altavista... (Score:1)
Free money.
I want the Altavista Database!!! (Score:1)
important is to have access to the database and
leave my agents fly around inside.
retrocool
Re:to hell with my 'karma', mod this illiterate do (Score:1)
First, where is the link to the "press release"? I posted a link to AltaVista's news area, has everything I was quoting.
It also said Altavista TO RELEASE. Ahem, that indicates that it is NOT released YET (that is what "to release" means, as in "going to release" as in sometime in the future).
Re:Babes love fishing (Score:1)
. o O ( In school they teach that plants have roots. How ridiculous! How can you take the root of something that's not a number? )
Re:It's all about bandwidth. (Score:2)
And what happens if a site is slashdotted or subjected to a DOS attack? In the first instance, they'ed risk removal because they were too popular. In the second instance they'ed risk removal because of an enemy or script kiddie...
I think Alta Vista's fine... The entire nature of the internet is based on there being no central authority... sites come and go. Pages change. And there isn't really a reasonable way of dealing with it, in my eyes.
Re:to hell with my 'karma', mod this illiterate do (Score:1)
That's why I said to look at AltaVista's press releases. Check out the source of the information.
Re:ZDNet removed the story! (Score:2)
Hey, it looks like their editors read
As a long time ZDuh watcher, I can tell you that it is quite common for them to simply disappear anything that is remotely embarrassing, and they NEVER acknowledge an error. Remember the 'Jesux' hoax? They don't.
======
"Rex unto my cleeb, and thou shalt have everlasting blort." - Zorp 3:16
PR Class (Score:2)
are they open-sourcing the crawling parts too? (Score:2)
I used to use altavista for all of my searching, but now that the search engines are lagging so far behind in indexing the content, we're forced to try multiple search engines to find what we're looking for. Yes, there are meta-search engines, but that's not what I'm looking for.
If they're letting us at the crawling/indexing code, maybe we can build a distributed indexing system along the lines of seti@home, mprime or one of the distributed.net projects.
Between that and an indexing system along the lines of the Library of Congress indexing code systems, we could jsut tame this beast yet.
non-secure application requires ssn# (Score:2)
not only does it ask for all your contact information (several times) but it asks for your social security number. all on an insecure form!
Isn't Google already doing this? (Score:2)
Such a scheme (without the registration or payback mechanism) has been in place for quite a while at Google:
http://services.google.com/cobrand/fr ee_trial [google.com]
Obviously, I would prefer to get money for the clickthroughs I generate, but I also want my clients to get great search results as well. At any rate, if I understand correctly, this does not appear to be the "open source" surprise represented in the article.
Re:Rather offtopic, but (Score:2)
OK Good doctor. Can we end this thread now?
Re:Autonomy (Score:2)