Computer industry giant IBM apparently has acquired the search engine startup blekko and shut down the website, only stating that blekko's technology will be integrated into IBM Watson.
This acquisition is eerily similar to Apple's deal with FoundationDB, an open source NoSQL database where all download sources were removed with the acquisition by Apple.
Blekko, which generated revenue through the sale of custom SEO statistics, used to donate vast URL collections to the non-profit Common Crawl project, which aims to develop open source search engine components and methods for efficient information retrieval.
As of now, there is no mention of the blekko acquisition on the Common Crawl website, however one might rightfully wonder whether URL donations are to continue.
Another search engine, Cuil, shut down in 2010, had donated crawl collections to the Internet Archive; however, the collections do not seem to be accessible as of writing.
Google announced plans to shut down Freebase, a knowledge base project it acquired in 2010, within six months after December 2014.There is, however, an open successor project named BaseKB.
All these incidents should remind us that we currently do not have a large enough, open, search infrastructure and that work needs to be done to move forward in that direction, despite big companies laying their hands on open information and locking it up in the process.
No comments:
Post a Comment