Comments on: Wikia Acquires Distributed Web Crawler Grub

By: Complete List of 2007 Web / Technology Acquisitions » The StartUp Blog at PartnerUp

Wed, 21 May 2008 15:17:56 +0000

[...] a distributed web-crawling technology. TechCrunch | ReadWriteWeb | GigaOm | Mashable | [...]

By: Get Ready For Wikia Search; First Screen Shots Shown In South Africa

Get Ready For Wikia Search; First Screen Shots Shown In South Africa — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 18:43:18 +0000

[...] much has happened since then, other than a lot of chatter on an email discussion list, and the small acquisition of Grub, a distributed web crawling company, from Looksmart. The official site for Wikia Search is [...]

By: Wikia Search in versiune alfa

Wikia Search in versiune alfa — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 08:23:19 +0000

[...] all. It’s based on the open source Nutch software and contains an index of web pages created by Grub (a company Wikia acquired last year). The search results are poor and thin, as would be expected if [...]

By: Le Blogueur » Blog Archive » La déception Wikia

Le Blogueur » Blog Archive » La déception Wikia — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 17:02:57 +0000

[...] sur l’open source Nutch qui est un logiciel et qui contient un index des pages web crées par Grub ( une société acquise par Wikia l’année dernière). Les résultats des recherches sont très [...]

By: Wikia Search Is A Complete Letdown.

Wikia Search Is A Complete Letdown. — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 06:24:33 +0000

[...] It’s based on the open source Nutch software and contains an index of web pages created by Grub (a company Wikia acquired last year). The search results are poor and thin, as would be expected. [...]

By: Le Blogueur » Blog Archive » Première capture d’écran du futur moteur de recherche Wikia

Wed, 02 Jan 2008 23:36:13 +0000

[...] de nouvelles depuis si ce n’est beaucoup de discussions par email et une petite acquisition , avec Grub, une société de “web crawling” appartenant à Looksmart. Le site officiel de [...]

By: Wishful Thinking » Get Ready For Wikia Search

Wishful Thinking » Get Ready For Wikia Search — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 23:57:07 +0000

By: Kord Campbell

Kord Campbell — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 20:20:27 +0000

Wikia’s plans for Grub go beyond what we were working on at the time LookSmart acquired us. Crawling in a distributed fashion isn’t that cool in and of itself - it’s what you can do with the data in a distributed fashion that makes things really exciting.

The best place to start getting involved with Grub, and the other pieces of the project is http://search.wikia.com/. The guy in charge is Jer Miller, of Jabber fame. We are looking for a few people to start working on porting the client back to Linux and starting a few projects that can reuse the crawl data - which will be open to everyone.

By: El blog de Javier Mendoza

El blog de Javier Mendoza — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 03:18:22 +0000

Buscadores: Wikia y la wikipedia como buscador…

Disculpadme, pero para variar el título no es estrictamente correcto. Más bien sería así como “Aplicando la filosofía de la wikipedia a un motor de búsqueda” qué es precisamente lo que Jimmy Wales, fundador del proyecto Wikipedia, pretende rea…

By: Martin Belam

Martin Belam — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 15:35:18 +0000

>> Grub was shut in 2005 following some minor controversy over the closed source code and the failure to comply with Robots.txt blocking requests.

It wasn’t a minor controversy if Grub got stuck on your site, disobeyed robots.txt and then crawled it to death

By: share.websitemagazine.com

share.websitemagazine.com — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 13:39:37 +0000

Wikia Acquires Distributed Web Crawler Grub…

Wikia has acquired the distributed web crawling engine Grub from Looksmart….

By: Jean Witter

Jean Witter — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 02:00:43 +0000

Exactly

By: Wikipedia Grub

Wikipedia Grub — Sun, 29 Jul 2007 19:51:57 +0000

[...] Wikia Acquires Distributed Web Crawler Grub Още по темата : Wikiasari [...]

By: 破百的老兵

破百的老兵 — Sun, 29 Jul 2007 13:59:15 +0000

Wikia 買下 Grub…

所以 Jimmy Wales 說要用工人智慧拼 search engine 是真的囉 ?

一大早就看到很多消息來源指稱 Wikia 購併了 Grub
，這是一個做 distributed crawler 的 open source 系統，原先設計的目的是要利用眾鄉民們的…..

By: Eric

Eric — Sat, 28 Jul 2007 18:59:19 +0000

Dang - the Grub website has been down most of the day today - overwhelmed by potential volunteers?

By: Dan's Diary

Dan's Diary — Sat, 28 Jul 2007 13:20:02 +0000

Ok another insignificant search engine changes hands…

Here’s a news.com post about the acquisition of the distributed online search engine Grub by Wikia.com:
‘Grub was acquired from LookSmart under the open-source project Wikia. The platform, now available for downloading and testing, is built…

By: housetier

housetier — Sat, 28 Jul 2007 08:20:49 +0000

You can download grub here: http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/

By: David Mackey

David Mackey — Sat, 28 Jul 2007 04:13:30 +0000

I like this acquisition b/c I’ve always thought Grub was an interesting idea. What in the world is Looksmart up to these days? It seems they closed down most of their interesting services.

By: Vijay Chakravarthy

Vijay Chakravarthy — Sat, 28 Jul 2007 00:00:04 +0000

I dont understand how they plan to use this..

Using distributed crawling will make it even easier for people to generate spam links as search results for everything under the sun. First thing many people will write is something that returns their set of pages for every single query.

By: DennisK

DennisK — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 21:55:53 +0000

Truthfully I don’t see the use in this acquisition. While distributed crawling using the community is useful, search is a hardward intensive business because of the serving of search results, not the crawling of the web. Having a distributed crawler does little to impact the overall effectiveness of a search system or cut down on hardware costs.

By: rod / techfold.com

rod / techfold.com — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 21:23:04 +0000

On the surface a distributed crawler seems like a great idea. That being said, though, if the algorithm used to index crawled data isn’t any good, all the processor cycles in the world will get Wikia nowhere.

BTW, thanks for making me feel dirty for using the word “algorithm,” Ask.

By: Nick Harris

Nick Harris — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 21:22:42 +0000

I can see a really interesting revenue model forming here:
Since distributed indexing will cut down costs, they could actually share some ad revenue with their users based on how much processing power they contribute. I could see that getting a lot of people hooked to the system.

By: MikeM

MikeM — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 21:14:37 +0000

My guess is they gave it away for near nothing. After all Wikia has leased LookSmart’s AdCenter platform and some search tech.
Good things ahead for Wikia I feel. LookSmart’s stock in the industry is also rising with partnerships with the likes of NYTimes, Reed, Facebook, Wikia, ASK and Active Athlete.
I can’t wait to see the wikia Search fully deployed.

By: What's Hot Today.com

What's Hot Today.com — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 20:15:49 +0000

I wonder what Grub.com sold for?

By: wolf

wolf — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 20:14:53 +0000

http://www.faroo.com goes even a step further: distributed crawling and distributed search.