Wikia acquires Grub distributed search indexing system

by admin July 30, 2007 at 1:43 pm

Wikia, the company created by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, has acquired the Grub distributed indexing system from LookSmart and is preparing to distribute Grub’s code under an open source license. Wikia plans to use Grub for its user-driven search engine, which is still under development.

Originally created in 2000, Grub leverages the distributed computing model to crawl the web and index pages. Users install a specialized client application on their computer, which then automatically performs indexing while idle and transmits page data back to a centralized repository. In this manner, volunteers will contribute the raw computing power that performs the indexing.

Full article: Ars Technica