Brian Gough’s Notes

Just wanted to say thanks to the organisers of FSCONS, FSFE and Henrik for a great conference in Gothenburg last weekend, where we held a GNU Get-together (some photos on the GNU webpage).

One of the most interesting talks for me was “Web Search By The People, For The People” by Michael Christen on the YaCy distributed search engine. It’s a java application, and is self contained once you have a working java installation. Surprisingly it even runs well on my Eeepc 701.

While the results aren’t (yet) comparable with centralised search engines, they are a lot better than I expected–sometimes it seems like a few additional heuristics would get it really close. I recommend downloading it and trying it out.