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Search - Monday, July 30, 2007

LookSmart Sells Distributed Search Engine Concept To Wikia

Jimmy Wales' Wikia has made an intriguing acquisition, buying an old search engine technology called GRUB from Looksmart. Wikia plans to incorporate GRUB and relaunch it as an open source offering.

Launched in 2000, Grub is a little known application that must be installed by volunteers whose computing power it uses to crawl the web and index pages. Grub currently only runs on Windows but Wikia hopes the open source community will port it to other systems. You can read a Wired review of Grub here back when it was in its infancy.

Wikia surely looked at the daunting computing power mustered for Google search and decided that distributed computing is that way to go. Wikia is walking a delicate line as an aggressively for-profit venture while hoping to tap into the good will of the open source and volunteer resources on the Net. Its not unprecedented as Alexa has won volunteer support and many for profits like Bittorrent ride the open source community. MarketingPilgrim provide a taste of the resentment that Wikia can bring if it does not get it right.

Read - Ars Technica post