Nutch

Apache Nutch

Developer(s) Apache Software Foundation
Stable release 1.9 and 2.2.1 / August 16, 2014
Development status Active
Written in Java
Operating system Cross-platform
Type Search Engine
License Apache License 2.0
Website nutch.apache.org

Nutch is an effort to build an open source web search engine based on Lucene and Java for the search and index component.

Features

Nutch is coded entirely in the Java programming language, but data is written in language-independent formats. It has a highly modular architecture, allowing developers to create plug-ins for media-type parsing, data retrieval, querying and clustering.

The fetcher ("robot" or "web crawler") has been written from scratch specifically for this project.

History

Nutch originated with Doug Cutting, creator of both Lucene and Hadoop, and Mike Cafarella.

In June, 2003, a successful 100-million-page demonstration system was developed. To meet the multimachine processing needs of the crawl and index tasks, the Nutch project has also implemented a MapReduce facility and a distributed file system. The two facilities have been spun out into their own subproject, called Hadoop.

In January, 2005, Nutch joined the Apache Incubator, from which it graduated to become a subproject of Lucene in June of that same year. Since April, 2010, Nutch has been considered an independent, top level project of the Apache Software Foundation.[1]

Releases

Apache Nutch Versions
Version Release Date Description
1.1 Release 2010-06-06 This release includes several major upgrades of existing libraries (Hadoop, Solr, Tika, etc.) on which Nutch depends. Various bug fixes, and speedups (e.g., to Fetcher2) have also been included.
V1.2 Released 2010-10-24 This release includes several improvements (addition of parse-html as a selectable parser again, configurable per-field indexing), new features (including adding timing information to all Tool classes, and implementation of parser timeouts), and bug fixes (fixing an NPE in distributed search, fixing of XML formatting issues per Document fields).
1.3 Release 2011-06-07 This release includes several improvements (improved RSS parsing support, tighter integration with Apache Tika, external parsing support, improved language identification and an order of magnitude smaller source release tarball—only about 2MB!).
1.4 Release 2011-11-26 This release includes several improvements including allowing Parsers to declare support for multiple MIME types, configurable Fetcher Queue depth, Fetcher speed improvements, tigther Tika integration, and support for HTTP auth in Solr indexing.
1.5 Release 2012-06-07 This release includes several improvements including upgrades of several major components including Tika 1.1 and Hadoop 1.0.0, improvements to LinkRank and WebGraph elements as well as a number of new plugins covering blacklisting, filering and parsing to name a few.
v2.0 Release 2012-07-07 This release offers users an edition focused on large scale crawling which builds on storage abstraction (via Apache Gora™) for big data stores such as Apache Accumulo™, Apache Avro™, Apache Cassandra™, Apache HBase™, HDFS™, an in memory data store and various high profile SQL stores.
v1.5.1 Release 2012-07-10 This release is a maintenance release of the popular 1.5.X mainstream version of Nutch which has been widely adopted within the community.
v2.1 Release 2012-10-05 This release continues to provide Nutch users with a simplified Nutch distribution building on the 2.x development drive which is growing in popularity amongst the community. As well as addressing ~20 bugs this release also offers improved properties for better Solr configuration, upgrades to various Gora dependencies and the introduction of the option to build indexes in elastic search.
v1.6 Release 2012-12-06 This release includes over 20 bug fixes, the same in improvements, as well as new functionalities including a new HostNormalizer, the ability to dynamically set fetchInterval by MIME-type and functional enhancements to the Indexer API including the normalization of URL's and the deletion of robots noIndex documents. Other notable improvements include the upgrade of key dependencies to Tika 1.2 and Automaton 1.11-8.
v2.2 Release 2013-06-08 This release includes over 30 bug fixes and over 25 improvements representing the third release of increasingly popular 2.x Nutch series. This release features inclusion of Crawler-Commons which Nutch now utilizes for improved robots.txt parsing, library upgrades to Apache Hadoop 1.1.1, Apache Gora 0.3, Apache Tika 1.2 and Automaton 1.11-8.
v1.7 Release 2013-06-24 This release includes over 20 bug fixes, as many improvements; most noticeably featuring a new pluggable indexing architecture which currently supports Apache Solr and Elastic Search. Shadowing the recent Nutch 2.2 release, parsing of Robots.txt is now delegated to Crawler-Commons. Key library upgrades have been made to Apache Hadoop 1.2.0 and Apache Tika 1.3.
v2.2.1 Release 2013-07-02 This release includes library upgrades to Apache Hadoop 1.2.0 and Apache Tika 1.3, it is predominantly a bug fix for NUTCH-1591 - Incorrect conversion of ByteBuffer to String.
V1.8 Release 2014-03-17 Although this release includes library upgrades to Crawler Commons 0.3 and Apache Tika 1.5, it also provides over 30 bug fixes as well as 18 improvements.

Advantages

Advantages of Nutch over a simple fetcher include[2]

Scalability

IBM Research studied the performance[3] of Nutch/Lucene as part of its Commercial Scale Out (CSO) project.[4] Their findings were that a scale-out system, such as Nutch/Lucene, could achieve a performance level on a cluster of blades that was not achievable on any scale-up computer such as the Power5.

The ClueWeb09 dataset (used in e.g. TREC) was gathered using Nutch, with an average speed of 755.31 documents per second.[5]

Related projects

Search engines built with Nutch

See also

References

Bibliography

External links