Dave Winer blogged on the emergence of Nutch. This probably marks the official beginning of “nutch-mania”. Or maybe the first stages of GoogleSlagging going public.

From Dave:

“Every time Google gets competition, I hope this is the one that sticks, the one that makes search a two horse race.

As a heavy user of search, I know this is not a good situation, one Silicon Valley company with so much power. When one of them takes hold it’s as if we have a new royal family, people who breathe air that’s finer than ours. They “get” things we don’t. They think outside the box, we’re stuck inside.”

From Nutch:

“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.”