Grub is an open source

distributed search Distributed web crawling is a distributed computing technique whereby Internet search engines employ many computers to index the Internet via web crawling. Such systems may allow for users to voluntarily offer their own computing and bandwidth ...

crawler platform. Users of Grub could

download In computer networks, download means to ''receive'' data from a remote system, typically a server such as a web server, an FTP server, an email server, or other similar system. This contrasts with uploading, where data is ''sent to'' a remote s ...

the peer-to-peer grubclient software and let it run during their computer's idle time. The client indexed the

URLs A Uniform Resource Locator (URL), colloquially termed as a web address, is a reference to a web resource that specifies its location on a computer network and a mechanism for retrieving it. A URL is a specific type of Uniform Resource Identi ...

and sent them back to the main grub server in a highly compressed form. The collective crawl could then, in theory, be utilized by an indexing system, such as the one being proposed at Wikia Search. Grub was able to quickly build a large snapshot by asking thousands of clients to crawl and analyze a small portion of the web each. Wikia has now released the entire Grub package under an

open source software license An open-source license is a type of license for computer software and other products that allows the source code, blueprint or design to be used, modified and/or shared under defined terms and conditions. This allows end users and commercial compan ...

. However, the old Grub clients are not functional anymore. New clients can be found on the Wikia wiki.

History

The project was started in 2000 by Kord Campbell, Igor Stojanovski, and Ledio Ago in Oklahoma City. Intellectual property rights were acquired from Grub in January 2003 for $1.3 million in cash and stock by

LookSmart LookSmart is an American search advertising, content management, online media, and technology company. It provides search, machine learning and chatbot technologies as well as pay-per-click and contextual advertising services. LookSmart also ...

. For a short time the original team continued working on the project, releasing several new versions of the software, albeit under a closed license. Operations of Grub were shut down in late 2005. On July 27, 2007, Jimmy Wales announced that Wikia, Inc., the for-profit company developing the open source search engine Wikia Search, had acquired Grub from

on July 17 for $50,000.LookSmart SEC filing
2007

References

External links

* Internet search engines Free search engine software Free web crawlers {{web-software-stub