But Doug said that his focus these days with Nutch is not to try to get a major, open source alternative to Google or Yahoo out there, though that remains a long term goal. Instead, he reports:
I’m opting for organic growth: get some users and developers
will follow.
In this vein, I put together a demonstration a few weeks ago for Oregon
State University. They love it. It’s at:
http://devjr.cws.oregonstate.edu:8080/en/search.html
Compare this to their Google appliance at:
http://search.oregonstate.edu/web/
The quality is pretty close, and the price a lot less. It took me about
20 steps to build that demo, I want to reduce that to just a couple, to
put it within the grasp of any campus webmaster. Then I’ll turn it over
to them to operate themselves.
I’m also contracting to build a Nutch-based search engine for the
Creative Commons, searching everything which uses one of their licenses.
Meanwhile, folks at a few universities are starting to use Nutch as a
platform for larger-scale search experiments.
Combined, these efforts should continue to push Nutch’s scalablility at
the same time as build an installed base, all without having to first
find a sugar daddy.