Will Open Source Search Hit Mainstream?

I am hoping this becomes reality. I think as long as the major search engines are public companies search will suffer.

Please chime in on where you think the search industry is headed.


I see open source search as our only alley for add-less SERPS.

The search industry is headed towards PPC. You should be headed towards your nearest spell checker -- if you want to be taken seriously.

LOL Gator99. The se's are headed to PPC in a major way.....I'm sure Billy will try to lead the pact (especially since he is so poor!) Yahoo has already embraced it. Its the only way they will survive, after all, they gotta pay the bills too.....

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Open source search will be big for niche engines and markets, but I don't know about an engine the size of google or yahoo. Being open source, there are going to be people that spend hours and hours digging through the code looking for ways to spam and take advantage of the search engine. Hell we have no idea how google works and look at how good people are at finding ways to spam it.

Bottom line, if you know how the system works, you can take advantage of it easier.

Google and MSN spend miilions in hardware alone, I don't think your gogin to colaborate that many small busineses and Bandwidth to cover millions of hits worldwide.

Besides By having an open source SE you expos the algo and no matter what you do someone will find a way to SPAM it!

Keep the 80% of the algo a secret, make money, and provide good search results.

Is that avatar from mardi gras?

I really don't know where people get that idea from. It is trivially easy to change the algorithm - just a matter of looking at the list of ranking factors ie

url_weight = 4;
title_weight = 2.8;
meta_keyword = 0.2;
keyword_density = 1.3;

... and so on, so when I set up my search engine I simply fill in the values that I like and everyone else who runs their open source search engine does the same - and furthermore, if I want I'll change it everyday and still furthermore, if I want I'll set different weights to different ranking factors for different search queries.

I fail to see how anyone can possibly optimize for that.

I thought I recognized Monty Python's Holy Grail there... How appropriate in the light of current events ...

Who knows...its perfect in theory...but then again...I guess they all started out that way.