Speaking at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) conference in the US, Wales announced that Wikia has acquired Grub, the original visionary distributed search project, from LookSmart and released it under an open source license for the first time in four years.
Grub operates under a model of users donating their personal computing resources towards a common goal, and is available today for download and testing at grub.org
Wales said the project had already received huge support from business.
“The desire to collaborate and support a transparent and open platform for search is clearly deeply exciting to both open source and businesses,” Mr Wales said.
“We’ve had a tremendous response from very interesting commercial players in the search space,” he said.
“Look for other exciting announcements in the coming months as we collectively work to free the judgment of information from invisible rules inside an algorithmic black box.”
Grub, now open source, is designed with modularity so that developers can quickly and easily extend and add functionality, improving the quality and performance of the entire system.
By combining Grub, which is building a massive, distributed user-contributed processing network, with the power of a wiki to form social consensus, the open source Search Wikia project has taken the next major step towards a future where search is open and transparent.
“In looking at the overarching industry, it has become clear that open is the business model of the future,” said LookSmart senior vice-president and CTO Michael Grubb.
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