Tim Oren asks an interesting question about the viability of nutch, an open source search technology project:
Can a pro bono effort hold its own indefinitely against the grind of standing off those with an ongoing monetary incentive to do ill by polluting metadata?Yup
If people find that their search results on commercial engines like Google, Yahoo!, or (in the very near future) MSN are choked with paid inclusions, sponsored links, and featured sites, there's going to be huge demand for pure search. In the same way that resentment of the closed nature of UNIX, Windows, Mac OS et al gave rise to the free software movement (and ultimately Linux), "free search" will be a cause celebre among the geeks.
Keeping nutch-based search services free from commercial ranking manipulation will be a one of the higher-profile ways of sticking it to the man, and there are always brownie points for that.
