Posts Tagged ‘Grabble’

Posted on April 20, 2009 - by Justin Hartman

Grabble laid to rest

In 2006 I was fascinated with search. So much so that I learnt all that I could about search engines and SEO and this was largely driven by the fact that I was in complete awe of Google at the time. All of this inspired me to start a South African search engine and during 2006 I launched Grabble.

Because I only understood the theory of search engine technology it wasn’t as easy as I had thought to start my own and implementing the technology was an extremely complicated experience. My very first version was powered by Lucene but as it was powered by Java (and TomCat) I had great difficulty in getting it to work as expected.

I then ran a version of mnoGoSearch which was run as a Perl command line utility and while this one seemed to give me the best results I had resource issues which hampered my efforts. What I soon figured out was why Google has a few hundred thousand servers powering their search engine and after about a week of indexing South African websites I ran out of disk space. With about 8 million records indexed I had used up my 80GB hard drive.

So, in the end Grabble went PHP and while I retained some indexing capabilities from mnoGoSearch I also tapped into Yahoo to help out. At the time Yahoo didn’t have a search API so I had to do a lot of hacking to get results returned from Yahoo. In particular, Yahoo provided all the image, news, videos, blogs, sport and forum search results.

While being in awe of Google I also felt that total dominance of only a few players in the market wasn’t a good thing. I believed, esoterically at the time, that local search needed to be dominated by a local company. These beliefs I still hold true to heart and I feel that it’s critical that competitors exist. There is something very uncomfortable in knowing that one or two companies hold the majority of the world’s data and I was convinced that Grabble would be a winner.

Almost three years later and I’ve been debating what to do with Grabble. For the last two months the site hasn’t even been operational (well web search anyway) and while I didn’t want to close it down completely I also had to face the reality that Grabble was never going to dominate and I simply did not have the time to maintain it any longer.

Then along came 4hoursearch – a website powered by the Yahoo BOSS search API and running off Google AppEngine. I stumbled across this site by chance and realised that they had released their source code under GPL. Subsequent to this finding I have now moved Grabble onto this Python software and my final version of Grabble has now been hatched.

What this final version does is allow me to keep the site up for those who still want to use it and at the same time it gives me an opportunity to say goodbye. Running through the Yahoo BOSS API means that I don’t have to worry about indexes any longer and living on the Google AppEngine means technology is now taken care of.

I have learnt so much about search through my efforts with Grabble and I hold it very close to my heart. While it never took off it did give me an opportunity to expand my knowledge and experience in an area I felt passionate about and the learning curve I’ve gone through has certainly helped define where I am today.

 

Posted on March 19, 2008 - by Justin Hartman

New Media Marketing Conference

Next week I’ll be presenting at the 2nd Annual New Media Marketing conference at Gallagher Estate in Midrand, Johannesburg. This four-day conference features an impressive lineup of speakers and I have to say it’s an honour to be presenting at such a great event.

I’m going to be talking about incorporating SEO and Social Media into a company’s marketing spend and it’s a perfect topic for me as I feel very passionate about both areas. These days I find myself working with Social Media more and more but my initial passion was always search.

I’ve long felt that while Google is an awesome company and I highly respect their ethos, one company should not control so much of the world’s data. Personally I’d rather have Google own my data than say Microsoft but I still maintain vertical search is a necessity in this ever dominant market.

When I developed Grabble in 2006 I thought I was onto a winner. Sadly it never took off (it’s almost dead in fact) but what I did gain out of this project was an appreciation for search and the technologies that power it. Grabble evolved from open source Java applications, Perl and then I settled on PHP.

There’s a reason why Google have a couple hundred thousand servers collecting, storing and processing information but none of this I could understand, contemplate or appreciate until I tried doing it myself.

What’s even better than talking about some passionate topics is the fact that I’m the second presenter which takes a lot of the pressure off me to really enjoy the remainder of the conference.

If anyone is still interested in going to the conference I have a whole bunch of vouchers which give you 25% discount off the conference price. Get in touch with me and I’ll happily hand them out.

 

Posted on November 22, 2007 - by Justin Hartman

African Web 2.0 map

Hash (aka Erik Hersman) has done an amazing map of Web 2.0 sites through Africa. Lots of people have commented and seen it already however it really is worth a mention here. Well done Hash, looking forward to using it soon!

 

Posted on March 21, 2007 - by Justin Hartman

Back online

So it’s been almost two weeks but I’m finally back online. I’ve learnt the hard way that if you don’t have RAID configured on your server you will lose everything if your hard drive packs up. A difficult lesson to learn but slowly picking up the pieces.

Grabble and others should be back online in the next couple hours/days…

 

Posted on January 18, 2007 - by Justin Hartman

Debian Wiki Launched

I’m please to announce that I’ve officially launched my own Debian Wiki. Over the last two weeks I have been setting up a new server for Grabble and due to my growing attraction to Debian I decided this new server will be powered entirely off of the ever popular GNU/Linux distribution.

The Debian Wiki was created solely because I needed something to help me keep track of what I was doing when setting the server up and as such it has developed into a whole series of tutorials if you will. There is a lot of documentation out there for Debian however it is difficult to make that documentation work for the new (soon-to-be) stable release of Debian 4 a.k.a. Etch and the Debian Wiki aims to fix this problem.

Every single HOWTO on the Debian Wiki has had to be tailored to work with Etch and as such I hope that others can find value when needing to setup a similar item on their Debian based server. The Server Category items on the Wiki are confusing to the layman however as time goes on I want to have a whole bunch of Desktop related items so that people who’ve never used Linux before can actually see that it’s not that difficult to operate!

So head on over to http://linux.justinhartman.com and give me your thoughts!

 

Posted on December 20, 2006 - by Justin Hartman

Is bad publicity good? and why i do grabble

It has been said that any publicity, good or bad, is good either way. Well I experienced my first bit of ‘bad’ publicity today with Grabble and I’m still undecided if it’s good for Grabble or not. In a recent post by Uno De Waal about the Grabble search engine I got less than rave reviews and it seems as if the readers of Uno’s Blog were just as perplexed.

It would appear that my lack of revenue model on Grabble is coming up for some critism and I must admit Uno is not the first to do so. While he may be the first person to publicly state this revenue model issue I have had a few people comment on this issue on a personal one-on-one level.
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Posted on December 18, 2006 - by Justin Hartman

Grabble shopping goes into beta

Grabble Shopping is the first of many new add-ons to the Grabble portfolio. This new sub-product of grabble is an initiative between Grabble and PriceCheck and hopes to provide a useful comparison shopping website for all users of the Grabble search engine.

About three weeks ago I was approached by Kevin from PriceCheck to potentially do some work together and I was certainly looking to provide some time of search for shopping websites in South Africa.
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Posted on October 30, 2006 - by Justin Hartman

Grabble.co.za is launched

It’s the latest addition to my stable of projects and I’m extremely proud to share it with you! Grabble (http://www.grabble.co.za) is a new South African search engine with a difference! Grabble gives you fast, accurate and AD FREE results and best of all we only search South African websites.

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