Developers work on open source web search engine

Developers at Nutch say that the number of search engines is decreasing and that the oligopoly could turn into a monopoly.

We think the Nutch folks mean Google, not Microsoft's search engine.

The Nutch folk, by the way, include Mitch Kapor, Tim O'Reilly, Peter Savich, Raymie Stata and Doug Cutting.

According to the web page, all major search engines have proprietary ranking formulae, and some other engines index sites depending on payment.

The developers claim that Nutch will not use such techniques but they admit there's a considerable challenge ahead.

An open source engine will have to fetch several billion pages a month, index them, search them 1000 times a second, and operate at a minimal cost.

The people are looking for developers or people to donate to the project, as you can read here. µ