Hello all,

My name is Pablo Rivera (orangethirty), founder of Nuuton.com. Been a software engineer for a while and have used LISP in various situations before. I joined this list in order to create an open discussion regarding the development of the Nuuton search engine. It is being developed with Common LISP (GNU CLISP).

We are currently in the design stage, and have not written a line of LISP. That is why I'm here. I would like to learn about your opinions before doing anything. As a collective, this group has a lot of knowledge about the language. Knowledge that will allow us to build a better search engine with LISP.

After searching around the web, I've found some projects aimed at developing web crawlers and the like with LISP. Though nothing too big or concrete. My guess is that no one has ever tried to write such system for production use. I hope to be wrong in those accounts. I will ask for your input in terms of judging how well the implementations currently available will fit Nuuton.

The first stage for the Nuuton search engine is to build a very basic crawling system. We already have one in Python. But I refuse to port over the Python code to LISP, because it would undermine the latter. If you so wish, I can go ahead and translate the Python code to LISP and we can work from there.

About the project: Nuuton is a new search engine. It is being actively developed by a team of three programmers. Our aim is to develop the search engine programmers need and want. Currently, our only focus is in serving the programming community. All the help you give us will in turn help the community in getting a good search engine that is not riddled with advertisements. Nuuton is also not in the business of selling advertising. We respect your privacy and will not demand that you hand over your personal information. Ever. I chose LISP because it provides the flexibility that we need for semantic web search.

Questions, opinions, anything is welcome.

(If this is the wrong mailing list, please point me in the right direction.)