Grub is the name for a distributed search crawler platform. 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 LookSmart. Distributed web crawling is a distributed computing technique whereby Internet search engines employ many computers to index the Internet via web crawling. ... Jimmy Donal Jimbo Wales, (born August 7, 1966)[2] is an American Internet entrepreneur best known for his role in founding Wikipedia, as well as other wiki-related projects, including the charitable organization Wikimedia Foundation, and the for-profit company Wikia, Inc. ... Wikia is a selective wiki hosting service (or wiki farm) founded in 2004 by Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley under the name Wikicities. ... Wikia (no official pronunciation[2]; originally Wikicities) is a selective wiki hosting service (or wiki farm) operated by Wikia, Inc. ... Looksmarts original site LookSmart owns an internet directory, Wisenut search engine, experimental Grub distributed web-crawling project, FindArticles premium content search and NetNanny desktop parental controls software. ...

The project was started in 2000 by Kord Campbell, Igor Stojanovski, and Ledio Ago in Oklahoma City. The intellectual property of Grub was purchased in 2003 by LookSmart, Ltd. For a short time the original team continued working on the project, releasing several new versions of the software, albeit under a closed license.

There were several controversial issues surrounding the Grub project in the time shortly after LookSmart aquired the project. Grub had a slight tendency to ignore a few mis-configured robots.txt files on the sites it crawled. Even when the development team addressed these issues, a few webmasters continued blaming it for crawling their site too much, and not respecting their robots.txt files.

Another issue was the closing of the source code base, and the apparent lack of using the crawled data for anything useful, such as a searchable index of the sites it crawled. It appears that Grub was used for a short time to seed the URL list for NetNanny, another acquisition of LookSmart.

Operations of Grub were shut down in late 2005. The site was reactivated on July 27, 2007, and the site is currently being updated. The original developers are assisting with the new deployment, and investigating the robots.txt issue, to ensure a repeat performance does not occur.

Users of Grub can download the grubclient software and let it run during computer idle time. The client indexed URLs 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 is able to quickly build a large snapshot by asking thousands of clients to crawl and analyze a small portion of the web each. This article is about the computer terms. ... It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with Computer program. ... A Uniform Resource Locator, URL (spelled out as an acronym, not pronounced as earl), or Web address, is a standardized address name layout for resources (such as documents or images) on the Internet (or elsewhere). ... This article does not cite any references or sources. ... In telecommunication, the term bandwidth compression has the following meanings: The reduction of the bandwidth needed to transmit a given amount of data in a given time. ... Wikia (no official pronunciation[2]; originally Wikicities) is a selective wiki hosting service (or wiki farm) operated by Wikia, Inc. ...

Wikia has now released the entire Grub package as open source. Wikia is a selective wiki hosting service (or wiki farm) founded in 2004 by Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley under the name Wikicities. ... Open source refers to projects that are open to the public and which draw on other projects that are freely available to the general public. ...

External links

• Official website