Nutch (the program we use to create our search sites) is capable of acting in “distributed” fashion. Nutch is integrated with a program called “Hadoop” that provides the “distributed” functionality. In the case of the geocentric search engines there exists the possibility that Nanaimo along with another 10 cities on Vancouver Island might be approached to contribute their resources to an overall “Vancouver Island” vertical search engine, or that 200 towns and cities in BC might want to all contribute to an overall “BC” search engine. Hadoop makes it possible.

This would mean that each “node” (city) might be able to contribute to the results without having to give up possession of their master fetchlist ie retain the value. It would also mean that various indexes could be assembled and licensed to other sites for inclusion so that a search engine based on the generic “music” might pay for an index from the Nanaimo geo-search engine, and from hundreds more cities for that matter.

It might also mean some sort of central management for all the geo-search dot coms, where crawl rules could be shared and crawls could be initiated from a specific site based on the subject(s). At any rate we will be including distributed aspects in our demonstrations, the better to investigate potential income opportunities and administrative savings.