Mozdex launched recently, it’s an open source search engine that uses DMOZ as its seed corn.
Cool: Every result has an “explain” button that shows the ranking code. Now that’s interesting.
It’s a tad slow, and new so it’s incomplete, but I hope takes off…and I hope Nutch will as well. (My 2.0 column on Nutch here…)
UPDATE: Gary, ever alert, notices this:
A quick check shows that the owner of GetHitsfromUS.com owns the
Mozdex.com domain.
http://www.whois.sc/mozdex.com
This may be a pure ad play, in other words. More when I know for sure.
It claims to be powered by Nutch Not sure if there is anyway to find out. If it is, it would seem unlikely to be a total scam.
Mozdex people sent an email announcing their site to one of the Nutch mailing lists, a few weeks ago.
As I’m one of the Lucene developers, which is the core of Nutch, I obviously keep tabs on these things… and other search stuff.
Byron at MozDex is not scamming anyone. It is totally built on Open Search and yes, he is selling sponsored text advertising via GetHitsfrom.us, a related, yet detached endeavour.
I too have been experimenting with the nutch engine and absolutely love it. I don’t love the way MozDex has used the Nutch name as the main theme of their marketing efforts and PR announcements.
If MozDex didn’t leverage the Nutch name and logos on their site and just did a press release saying they’re the new kid on the block I’d be fine with it. But it’s not cool to piggyback on the Nutch name for short term gain. Right or wrong.
We are using 100% open source, and yes we use nutch. I’ve already announced our goals and ambitions as well as asked for the ability to use the code out there and they said “that is what it is for”
Open source doesn’t mean we have to hack it to what it isn’t. At this point in time in the early developments of the engine we felt it was best to stick to something that we could pull from cvs and upgrade and integrate as well as provide patches back to the tree on our own bug fixes with our current setup.
We are going to be announcing our move to our new datacenter as well as integrating branching, and “ask mozdex” where you can use regular sentence questions and many other features.
We will also be providing a story about the building of a search engine, the hardware and resouces we will consume as well as provid the nutch crew our benchmarks and access to the internals.
We use the sponsored listings to help cover our bandwidth and server fees. We already have 5 servers going and use about 10mb sustainted bandwidth with fetchers in full crawl. It isn’t cheap and we still ask for support and the donations we have received have been very helpfull and the donators have been very appreciative of our goals.
If you have any specific questions, don’t hesitate to email me directly 🙂
I work a full time job, have a pregnant wife with a baby do in weeks and i pay for this out of my pocket for the experience and for the grand goal i have of being able to build a self sustained open search index using the many open technologies available.
Thanks!
Byron,
Sounds like you and I have a lot in common. My wife is expecting, I have a full time job and pay for all of my research, etc… out of my own pocket as well. My not be the fastest way to grow a business but it’s the best way to learn and learning is what I’m interested in.
I appreciate your candid response and look forward to seeing the data you post about Nutch in the future. Let me know if you’d like to collaborate, I’m putting 3 boxes online in a couple weeks with nutch and wouldn’t mind sharing my architecture with you.
Hi, Byron
Where do you see MozDex in 2 years?