Every Saturday on AltSearchEngines we take a trip to a distant land in search of strange and wonderful new alternative search engines.

This week we double back to South Africa to check out rumors of a blog search engine named Gargoyle, and the mysterious Gargoyle experiment.

Here’s what we found:

The Gargoyle experiment continues unabated. The master plan is still to search voluntarily submitted Blogs and other sites with a similar type context in a free and fair fashion. The philosophy in mind, code named ‘Nutch,’ is very similar to that of open source applications. Nutch is a nascent effort to implement an open-source web search engine. Web search is a basic requirement for internet navigation, yet the number of web search engines is decreasing. Today’s oligopoly could soon be a monopoly, with a single company controlling nearly all web search for its commercial gain. That would not be good for users of the internet, according to Gargoyle.

Nutch provides a transparent alternative to commercial web search engines. Only open source search results can be fully trusted to be without bias. (Or at least their bias is public.) All existing major search engines have proprietary ranking formulas, and will not explain why a given page ranks as it does. Nutch, on the other hand, has nothing to hide and no motive to bias its results or its crawler in any way other than to try to give each user the best results possible.

A typical search result in Gargoyle looks like this:

Each matching page in the results has the following links:

• (cached) displays the version of the page that Gargoyle downloaded.
• (explain) displays an explanation of how this page scored.
• (anchors) shows the list of incoming anchors indexed for this page.

Click on this button on the homepage, and it will take you to Zamatomu; a resource for all South African blogs.

Finally, just a reminder that we covered grabble, a South African general search engine back in June when it only indexed 25 million pages; now it’s up to 35 million!

If you meet these two criteria: you’re a) bilingual, and b) interested in search engines, we are looking for volunteer country representatives to aid us in our global travels, be it Poland, Sweden, Japan, or Australia. Just email me at Charles@ReadWriteWeb.com and let’s talk about it.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 18th, 2007 at 10:48 pm and is filed under Global. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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