Wikipedia Gets Grub

[Dashken]

Wales isn’t throwing around the term “Google killer” or anything like that, however. According to Eric Auchard, he stipulated that the change would take place “[i]f we can get good quality search results,” and went on to add, “I could be wrong about this, but it seems like a likely outcome.”

So what is it about Grub that spurred this statement? As described by Neon Kelly, distributed computing is the key. “Grub users download a program which makes uses of their computer’s processing power while the machine is left idle. If widely adopted, such an arrangement could reduce the need for Wikia to set up a web crawling network of its own.”

Other details concerning Wikia’s acquisition of Grub remain unknown; there’s no telling what the purchase price was, in other words. But Wikia has “released [Grub] under an open source license for the first time in four years,” according to a press release, so there shouldn’t be any secrets in that respect.

As for the balance of power - if anybody can challenge Google and its $160 billion market cap, Jimmy Wales has to be one of the leading candidates.

Source: http://www.webpronews.com/node/39615/print