Nutch home page (English)

Mailing lists links at SourceForge (English)

Article from CNET (English)

What you can do to contribute (English)

'Google Censorship-How It Works' (English)

Perhaps you are not aware of how search engines can be used to censor news, in which case you can take a look at the above article about Google. You should also realize that website programmers can use certain techniques to increase the relevance of their pages, in order to increase their ranking and make their sites come up closer to the top for a given search query. The increasing commercialization of search engines is also a concern to some, although someone must eventually pay for these "free" services. While none of these things is particularly bad in and of itself, the tendancy for content control and restrictions will eventually hamper the freedom of the internet.

In order to counteract these tendancies, a group called Nutch.org has been formed to create an alternative, effectively a Free Software search engine. The links provided above will tell you about the project, which should come online in the near future. Since the software is Open Source, it should eventually provide the possibility of more than one server location, or perhaps smaller search engines with specific limited domains of operation. We look forward to being able to try this service soon.

The Nutch board of directors has several OSS heavyweights: Mitch Kapor, Tim O'Reilly, Peter Savich (Overture Research), Raymie Stata (UCSC), and Doug Cutting. If you can contribute to this project with programming, money, or language resources, please visit the site and make the appropriate contact. Realize that the Free/Open Source Software community is very inclusive, and needs people who have all kinds of different skills. You have only to find a place which fits your own knowledge and interests, and your contributions will help others all over the planet, as well as your own continued personal development.

Willy Smith, reporting from Costa Rica