Matt Haughey talks about the switch of the Creative Commons search engine (used to record the semantics of web page metadata) to use Nutch: “We flipped the switch last week and have been testing it ever since. Compared to the last version of our search engine, this one is blazingly fast to return results, the results are much more specific to what you’re looking for, and it is constantly keeping up to date on over 1 million pages with Creative Commons license info in them.”
Notes Doug Cutting about the newly launched Creative Commons Search: “It crawls CC-licensed pages, indexing license properties, making them searchable. I did most of the initial development, using it as a motivating case when adding metadata support to Nutch… This is cool in several ways. It demonstrates how easily Nutch can be extended to do stuff that would be hard to do with any other search engine. (This is all of the CC-specific code.) It’s also cool since it helps folks find content they can reuse, like songs that can be sampled, art that can be clipped and text that can be excerpted.”
It’s clear that the Semantic Web will happen not all-at-once but little by little as cool efforts such as this one create a groundswell.