Grub (search engine) explained

Grub was an open source distributed search crawler platform.^[1]

Users of Grub could download the peer-to-peer client software and let it run during their computer's idle time. The client fetched a list of URLs from the main grub server, indexed them and sent them back to the main grub server in a compressed form.^[2]

History

Grub, Inc. was founded in 2000 by Kord Campbell in Oklahoma City.^{[3] [4]} Intellectual property rights were acquired from Grub in January 2003 for $1.3 million in cash and stock by LookSmart.^[5] 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, then developing an open-source search engine called Wikia Search, had acquired Grub from LookSmart.^[6] Wikia, now called Fandom, released the Grub source under an open-source license.^[7]

Notes and References

1. Web site: Grub . dead . https://web.archive.org/web/20030130015439/http://grub.org/ . 2003-01-30 . grub.org.
2. Web site: Client Downloads . dead . https://web.archive.org/web/20030208010718/http://www.grub.org/html/downloads.php . 2003-02-08 . grub.org.
3. Web site: grub.org - Investors . usurped . https://web.archive.org/web/20001209031600/http://www.grub.org/investors.html . 2000-12-09 . grub.org.
4. Web site: grub.org - Owners . usurped . https://web.archive.org/web/20010408054446/http://www.grub.org/owners.php . 2001-04-08 . grub.org.
5. Web site: Report of Independent Registered Public Accounting Firm . 2024-07-31 . www.sec.gov.
6. News: 2007-08-09 . Wikipedia founder to challenge Google and Yahoo . 2024-07-31 . Reuters.
7. Web site: 2007-07-27 . Jimmy Wales and Wikia Release Open Source Distributed Web Crawler Tool . usurped . https://web.archive.org/web/20070821061921/http://www.wikia.com/wiki/Search_Wikia_OSCON . 2007-08-21 . Wikia.