Hey everyone. Last year I started building my own non-profit search engine, using the open-source platform, Nutch. The idea was to provide an alternative to the for-profit engines currently controlling the Internet. Give it a test drive here: http://search.isara.org The developer of Nutch said: Our search engine servers are located at the Isara Learning Center in Nong Khai, Thailand. A facility my charity organization and I built last year to provide free education to the poor. Although development of the search engine has been slow we hope that, one day, a non-profit search engine will be available to the public. Thank you, PK Gillock Isara.org Charity
How does Isara work? I don't mean the algo, I mean how do you translate visits to the search engine into funding for your charity projects? You don't seem to carry any advertising, other than a Google search logo. And having that seems to go against your stated aim of providing "a non-profit alternative to the money-oriented corporations that currently control the Internet". I'm not going to pass judgement on the search quality: 5 million pages is really too small a sample to test anything.
Obelia - Thanks for your questions. As you noticed, ACORN (our non-profit search engine) is not nearly ready to provide relevant search results (but we must start some where - lol). Until it is ready we will continue to use G**gle for our main web portal. Even though it's not ideal, they are what people prefer and getting people to change their surfing habits is not easy. It takes time. Possibly next year we will make the switch to our own search engine, but it will be a gradual process; G**gle providing the main results and Isara providing secondary. And then Isara providing the primary results and G**gle secondary. We have sponsors who are not interested in being advertised (yet) but pay depending on how much traffic the site receives. 100% of those funds then goto the projects we create, including the Learning Center where our volunteers and I are located. We also have a few sponsors waiting for our site to get a certain amount of web traffic before they get involved.
For some reason I like it and although you only have 5.2m pages indexed I like it it's help ful and not to busy looking, simple like big G.
I would support you with some bandwith usage. Maybe you could consider only advertising nonprofit companies. That would bring advertising in, and also keep it a charity thing. I imagine there are plenty of non profit companies wanting to get their message out. if you make it as easy to use as google. im there..
Thanks for that explanation. I'd like to add it as a search engine to Firefox. If you go here http://mycroft.mozdev.org/submitos.html you can generate a search plugin that people can use.
Thanks, everyone. I appreciate it. Actually, Obelia, we already have a search add-on for Firefox and IE7. Just visit our mainpage at http://www.isara.org and then click on your Firefox search drop-down menu. It should be listed as "Add Isara.org" or something like that. Let me know if that works. Thanks.
This looks pretty good for such a small index. I like it a lot and wish you the best on this project...
Thanks, Badlands07. We had to take ACORN offline for a few hours because our router crashed. Should be online again soon.
Sorry. The search engine is still offline. We got a new router. Now I've just got to configure it correctly.