mozDex was a project to build an Internet-scale
search engine
A search engine is a software system that provides hyperlinks to web pages, and other relevant information on World Wide Web, the Web in response to a user's web query, query. The user enters a query in a web browser or a mobile app, and the sea ...
with
free and open source software
Free and open-source software (FOSS) is software available under a Software license, license that grants users the right to use, modify, and distribute the software modified or not to everyone free of charge. FOSS is an inclusive umbrella term ...
(FOSS) technologies like
Nutch
Apache Nutch is a highly extensible and scalable Open-source license, open source web crawler software project.
Features
Nutch is coded entirely in the Java (programming language), Java programming language, but data is written in language-ind ...
. Since its search algorithms and code were open, it was hoped that no search results could be manipulated by either mozDex as a company or anyone else. As such, instead of having to trust mozDex to be fair, it puts the trust on the community of users through the same "
peer review
Peer review is the evaluation of work by one or more people with similar competencies as the producers of the work (:wiktionary:peer#Etymology 2, peers). It functions as a form of self-regulation by qualified members of a profession within the ...
" process that is believed to enhance security of free software like
Linux
Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...
.
mozDex aimed to make it easy and encourage building upon this open search technology to extend it with various additional potentially useful search related features. Some of the latest features added or announced by mozDex included social bookmarking via free skimpy service, "''did you mean''" spell checking, anti-spam technology and instant crawl.
As an open search engine, mozDex relied heavily on community feedback and actively solicited user opinions as well as encouraged discussions about various aspects of mozDex's growth.
In 2006, mozDex aimed to add around 15 million pages a day in order to reach the goal of more than 4 billion pages indexed at the end of 2006.
[ ]
See also
*
Nutch
Apache Nutch is a highly extensible and scalable Open-source license, open source web crawler software project.
Features
Nutch is coded entirely in the Java (programming language), Java programming language, but data is written in language-ind ...
*
PageRank
PageRank (PR) is an algorithm used by Google Search to rank web pages in their search engine results. It is named after both the term "web page" and co-founder Larry Page. PageRank is a way of measuring the importance of website pages. Accordin ...
References
External links
Mozdexs SourceForge websiteInterview with founder
Defunct internet search engines
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