Grub (search engine)

Grub was an open source distributed search crawler platform.

Not to be confused with GNU GRUB, the boot loader.
Grubby, the Official Grub Mascot

Users of Grub could download the peer-to-peer grubclient software and let it run during their computer's idle time. The client indexed the 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 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.[1] Intellectual property rights were acquired from Grub in January 2003 for $1.3 million in cash and stock by LookSmart.[2] 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, Inc., the for-profit company developing the open source search engine Wikia Search, had acquired Grub from LookSmart[3] on July 17 for $50,000.[4] On that same day, the site was reactivated and is currently being updated.

gollark: So if you do compile it you'll still be stuck with possible horrible security issues, due to not actually getting any driver updates.
gollark: They generally just take one outdated kernel version, patch in the code they need, ship it, and then never update it, instead of "upstreaming" the drivers so they'll be incorporated in the official Linux source code.
gollark: You know how I said that companies were obligated to release the source code to the kernel on their device? Some just blatantly ignore that (*cough*MediaTek*cough*). And when it *is* there, it's actually quite bad.
gollark: It's actually worse than *just* that though, because of course.
gollark: There are some other !!FUN!! issues here which I think organizations like the FSF have spent some time considering. Consider something like Android. Android is in fact open source, and the GPL obligates companies to release the source code to modified kernels and such; in theory, you can download the Android repos and device-specific ones, compile it, and flash it to your device. How cool and good™!Unfortunately, it doesn't actually work this way. Not only is Android a horrible multiple-tens-of-gigabytes monolith which takes ages to compile (due to the monolithic system image design), but for "security" some devices won't actually let you unlock the bootloader and flash your image.

References
  1. Grub Inc. Investors page as archived by Archive.org, December 2000
  2. LookSmart SEC filing, 2003
  3. "Jimmy Wales and Wikia Release Open Source Distributed Web Crawler Tool". Wikia, Inc. Press release. 27 July 2007 Archived August 21, 2007, at the Wayback Machine
  4. LookSmart SEC filing, 2007


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