Wikia has acquired the distributed web crawling engine Grub from Looksmart.
Grub utlizes spare computing cycles on users’ computers to index the web, a similar concept to that used by SETI@home in the search for extraterrestrial life.
Grub originally started in 2000 and was purchased in 2003 by LookSmart. Grub was shut in 2005 following some minor controversy over the closed source code and the failure to comply with Robots.txt blocking requests.
Wikia will open source the Grub code “as soon as possible” and use the data from Grub to feed the Search Wikia Project.
The price of the acquisition was not disclosed.
(via R/WW)