Grub is an open source distributed search 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 ...

the

peer-to-peer Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads between peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the network. They are said to form a peer-to-peer ...

grubclient

software Software is a set of computer programs and associated software documentation, documentation and data (computing), data. This is in contrast to Computer hardware, hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. ...

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 Identifi ...

and sent them back to the main grub

server Server may refer to: Computing *Server (computing), a computer program or a device that provides functionality for other programs or devices, called clients Role * Waiting staff, those who work at a restaurant or a bar attending customers and su ...

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 Wikia Search was a short-lived free and open-source web search engine launched by Wikia, a for-profit wiki-hosting company founded in late 2004 by Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley. Wikia Search followed other experiments by Wikia into search eng ...

. 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. 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 Oklahoma City (), officially the City of Oklahoma City, and often shortened to OKC, is the capital and largest city of the U.S. state of Oklahoma. The county seat of Oklahoma County, it ranks 20th among United States cities in population, a ...

. Intellectual property rights were acquired from Grub in January 2003 for $1.3 million in cash and stock by LookSmart. 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 Fandom (formerly known as Wikicities before 2007 and later Wikia before 2019) is a wiki hosting service that hosts wikis mainly on entertainment topics (i.e. video games, TV series, movies, entertainers, etc.). Its domain is operated by Fandom, ...

, Inc., the for-profit company developing the open source search engine

, had acquired Grub from LookSmart 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