Nutch: Flexible and Scalable Open-Source Web Search Engine

Nutch is an open-source Web search engine that can be used at global, local, and even personal scale. Its initial design goal was to enable a transparent alternative for global Web search in the public interest — one of its signature features is the ability to “explain” its result rankings. Recent work has emphasized how it can also be used for intranets; by local communities with richer data models, such as the Creative Commons metadata-enabled search for licensed content; on a personal scale to index a user's files, email, and web-surfing history; and we also report on several other research projects built on Nutch. In this paper, we present how the architecture of the Nutch system enables it to be more flexible and scalable than other comparable systems today.

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