mozDex was a project to build an Internet-scale
search engine
A search engine is a software system designed to carry out web searches. They search the World Wide Web in a systematic way for particular information specified in a textual web search query. The search results are generally presented in a ...
with
free and open source software
Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source ...
(FOSS) technologies like
Nutch
Apache Nutch is a highly extensible and scalable open source web crawler software project.
Features
Nutch is coded entirely in the Java programming language, but data is written in language-independent formats. It has a highly modular archite ...
. Since its search algorithms and code were open, it was hoped that no search results could be manipulated by either mozDex as a company or anyone else. As such, instead of having to trust mozDex to be fair, it puts the trust on the community of users through the same "
peer review
Peer review is the evaluation of work by one or more people with similar competencies as the producers of the work (peers). It functions as a form of self-regulation by qualified members of a profession within the relevant field. Peer review ...
" process that is believed to enhance security of free software like
Linux
Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...
.
mozDex aimed to make it easy and encourage building upon this open search technology to extend it with various additional potentially useful search related features. Some of the latest features added or announced by mozDex included social bookmarking via free skimpy service, "''did you mean''" spell checking, anti-spam technology and instant crawl.
As an open search engine, mozDex relied heavily on community feedback and actively solicited user opinions as well as encouraged discussions about various aspects of mozDex's growth.
In 2006, mozDex aimed to add around 15 million pages a day in order to reach the goal of more than 4 billion pages indexed at the end of 2006.
[ ]
See also
*
Nutch
Apache Nutch is a highly extensible and scalable open source web crawler software project.
Features
Nutch is coded entirely in the Java programming language, but data is written in language-independent formats. It has a highly modular archite ...
*
PageRank
PageRank (PR) is an algorithm used by Google Search to rank web pages in their search engine results. It is named after both the term "web page" and co-founder Larry Page. PageRank is a way of measuring the importance of website pages. According ...
References
External links
Mozdexs SourceForge websiteInterview with founder
Internet search engines
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