There have been many significant changes to the face of
search over the last several years with engines becoming more
intelligent than ever before. Today's users expect mainly fast,
easy, relevant and satisfactory search results. In response to
this search engines have responded by giving users more control
over search results than ever through the emergence of
alternative search engines.

One instance of these
so-called alternative search engines goes by the name of Nutch. Nutch is a two-year-old
open source project, which has been hosted previously at
Soundforge and backed by a non-profit organization. Since then
it has been determined that the Apache license is the most
appropriate, with Nutch no longer requiring the overhead of an
independent non-profit organization. The board of directors and
the developers both were in favor of the move to the Apache
Foundation.

Nutch builds on Lucene technology, which
was developed under the watchful eye of Doug Cutting, the
primary developer for both of these open source projects. Doug
has been working in the field for almost two decades and has
spent three years at Apple, four years at Excite as well as 5
years at Xerox PARC, so it is safe to say that Doug definitely
knows his stuff. Lucene is suitable for nearly any application
that requires full-text search, especially cross-platform. It is
a full-featured, high-performance, text search engine library,
coded entirely in Java to implement web search. Nutch is an
application; you can download it and run it. It adds a crawler
and other web-specific stuff to Lucene as well as it's very own
search algorithm and a link analysis module. Nutch aims to
search the entire web like Google or Yahoo! but has a few tricks
up its sleeve thanks to the beauty of open source licensing.

I recently had the privilege to interview Mel Strocen,
the CEO of Jayde Online,
Inc., one of the Web's major online publication and search
companies. Mel had some

very exciting news to report on
how Jayde is planning to utilize the Nutch application.

Jayde has been developing a customized version of Nutch for the
last eight months and is planning to launch a search engine
based on the Nutch technology within the next few weeks. The
initial beta version will consist of a network of dedicated
servers with an index of between 20 and 30 million website
listings.

The real potential of this new search engine,
and others using the Nutch technology, lies in the fact that it
is open source and uses a "Plug-In Architecture". What this
means is that the engine will be perpetually evolving and
constantly improving to better facilitate the needs of
searchers. One terrific example that shows us just how
beneficial this type of open source plug-in technology can be is
the F
ireFox web browser.

FireFox, in its short existence
has eaten up a significant portion of the once all mighty
Internet Explorer's market share. The popularity of this browser
is due to the fact that it is constantly making itself smarter.
You can now find a plug-in for virtually anything that you
require , ranging from web developer, downloading, and search
tools to privacy, security, website integration and humorous
plug-ins. You name it, there is an extension for it. The
extension library consists of nearly six hundred different
plug-ins and is growing daily thanks to the help of contributors
everywhere.

Now just imagine implementing this type of
plug-in technology to a search engine, with one type of plug-in
for say searching MP3s and another plug-in for downloading PDFs.
The possibilities of this new open source search technology are
infinite. Now the term "open-source search engine" may make a
lot of people's minds wander towards the idea of Black Hat
search engine optimization. The primary developer of Nutch, Doug
Cutting, feels that the closed-source advantage is not nearly as
much of a factor as one might imagine it to be. The fact that
the search engine is open-source allows sp@mmers to be detected
far faster than that of closed-source search engines latest sp@m
detecting algorithms. Either way, you know that the sp@mmers
will eventually figure out how it works, the only difference is
how quickly. So the top anti-sp@m techniques, closed or open
source, are those that continue to function even when their
mechanism is known.

Another type of alternative search
engine technology has just recently been released to beta
version is "Relevancy
Rank" from the Claria Corporation, the minds behind Gator. I
had the pleasure to conduct an interview with the Vice President
and Executive Chief of Marketing, Scott Eagle. He had some very
interesting things to say about the launch of this new product
and what exactly the benefit of Relevancy Rank has to the user.
This unique search technology takes the results from the top
search engines and applies its very own algorithms to output to
the user the most relevant results.

Relevancy Rank is a
combination of personalization, localization, time spent at any
one site, click through rates as well as conversions. These are
all taken into account to provide the most relevant results.
"For an example, if you happened to be a zoologist who loved to
search for different animals and information relating to animals
and you entered the word "Jaguar" you would be returned far
different results from say a car enthusiast who searched
frequently for different types of vehicles and also typed in the
word "Jaguar"", noted Scott. Relevancy Rank helps to provide you
with the most relevant results based on your previous search
behavior.

With the end users expectations continuing to
grow, these twists on the way that results are gathered and
displayed are an enormous help in satisfying the user's hunger
to get to the results that they are looking for. I am quite
anxious to see how these new forms of search technology fair out
over the next several months. One thing is for sure, these new
technologies are sure to revolutionize the way that web search
is conducted and pave a new path for the evolution of
search.