Cthuugle is BACK!

That is not dead which can eternal lie, but in great eons, even Enki can get off his fat ass and reboot a server :)

Yes, folks, it's true. Cthuugle is BACK! Bigger, stronger and better than ever! Please feel free to Digg it.

UPDATE: I did some upgrades to the search grouping and paging algorithms to get more (4x) efficiency.

When I originally created the HP Lovecraft themed Cthuugle search engine, there was a library of Lovecraft's work which allowed users to read his stories online. Shortly after I launched the engine, legal threats took this library offline. Years went by, and I kinda forgot about Cthuugle except for whenever my renewals came up. Everybody else still remembered it though, to the tune of 3000 unique visitors per day or so.

When this year's renewal came up, I decided to read some Lovecraft stories, and was shocked to discover that the copyrights on all of his stories had expired THIS YEAR! Clearly celebration, and some hacking, was in order.

The old ht://dig search engine is pretty stale at this point, so that was a non starter. I have been looking for an excuse to install Lucene on one of my servers, so I created a vhost on one of my virtual machines and got things started. The new Cthuugle uses Nutch with Lucene and Tomcat. I wrote some custom crawl and merge scripts, and set things to autostart, and now we have a working search engine. After a little tweaking of the JSP, the original look and feel were easy enough to duplicate as well. The added bonus of more granular results and the ability to view explanations for search results were also really nice. One NginX proxy was added for flavor. Done.

I quickly added The Temple of Dagon to my index, where Aleister had so nicely collected all of Lovecraft's work. Now Cthuugle can find all of Lovecraft's stories, poems, and essays.

If I missed your Cthulhu themed site, let me know at derek squiggle armyofevilrobots dott com