Dutch local search engine iLocal goes open source

Tue 3 March 2009 11:12, Bas van den Beld

Dutch Search Engine service iLocal announced it is going to be the first company to be launching a open source local search platform.

The Dutch website, on which you can find shops, craftsmen, products and brands close to your home, is the main competitor of the Dutch Yellow Pages. By using open source it takes a big step in a market which is based on 'old fashioned' tactics.

Yellow Pages is in Holland still strugling to get a good grip on the possibilities of the internet. The big advantage the company had are almost completely gone. iLocal now is the major site in this area in Holland.

iLocal uses the posibilities of the internet to the fullest. It has been working on their search technology since they started in 2005.

Now they are implementing a search engine based on Lucene and SOLR open source libraries. Edwin Adriaansen, CTO of iLocal, claims his company is the first to launch a local search platform based on these services. He says iLocal made add ons and changes to Lucene to make the software perfect for their company. iLocal is full owner of the technology and in the meanwhile will be profiting from the open source community to improve the search engine.

<GMail Phishing going round

Here come the visual ads>

Comments (3)

- Jochem Prins
- [website]
When I read the title of this post I thought iLocal is going to opensource their own platform. After reading the article, I understand that they based their own platform on opensource technology. In that context, I don't understand the statement "iLocal is the full owner of the technology".

As far as I know iLocal is not the major site in this area. That's still the traditional Goudengids / DeTelefoongids, see http://trends.google.com/websites?q=ilocal.nl%2C+goudengids.nl%2C+detelefo...

Thu 5 Mar 2009, 11:13
- Maurits Straatman
I think Ilocal is cutting their costs, and ever since their own technology doesnt do the search trick, they chose for this low cost but reliable option. As far as i'm concerned a lot of companies use Lucene.

Fri 6 Mar 2009, 12:42
- Jonathan Nash
I have been hearing a lot about hyper local search lately, but most of the players utilize one of the main search tech. players, there are very few who dare go the fully open source way. Kudos to ilocal for doing that..

Thu 12 Mar 2009, 20:56

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