I beg to differ
High David,
I'd like to point out a few things.
The licenses of Nutch allow the use and incorporation of proprietary ranking algorithms. But what it supplies is an efficient, scalable engine, where one can concentrate on the ranking algorithm alone and does not have to deal with the crawling and database performance issues. Thus allowing more competing offers for search engines, which I believe is a good thing.
Second, secrecy does not protect against exploitation, as the current situation with search engines shows pretty well. You can also see this in the multitude of successful attacks against Microsoft's OS, despite the fact that its source code is secrete. We live in a world where reverse engineering is taught in colleges and is part of learning and the free flow of information.
In the security community, a encryption algorithm is only considered secure, if its working is well known and public knowledge. I think we should apply the same principles towards search engines. I believe we then can come up with methods and algorithms that will be exploitation reduced (or free).
Do I know a solution for this? No! But I believe Nutch gives everyone who has an idea, a platform to try it out. Nutch could be a stepping stone towards the solution.
What are your thoughts?
K<o>
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