Search is part of the fundamental infrastructure of the Internet. And, it is currently broken. Why is it broken? It is broken for the same reason that proprietary software is always broken: lack of freedom, lack of community, lack of accountability, lack
Wikia, last week bought the distributed crawler Grub from LookSmart and plans to make it available in open source. Not that LookSmart was really using it anyway — and they also did ad business with Wikia.