Nutch is an effort to build an open source

Open source

The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...

 web search engine

Web search engine

A web search engine is designed to search for information on the World Wide Web and FTP servers. The search results are generally presented in a list of results often referred to as SERPS, or "search engine results pages". The information may consist of web pages, images, information and other...

 based on Lucene Java

Lucene

Apache Lucene is a free/open source information retrieval software library, originally created in Java by Doug Cutting. It is supported by the Apache Software Foundation and is released under the Apache Software License....

 for the search and index component.
Nutch is coded entirely in the Java programming language

Java (programming language)

Java is a programming language originally developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems and released in 1995 as a core component of Sun Microsystems' Java platform. The language derives much of its syntax from C and C++ but has a simpler object model and fewer low-level facilities...

, but data is written in language-independent formats. It has a highly modular architecture, allowing developers to create plug-ins for media-type parsing, data retrieval, querying and clustering.

The fetcher ("robot" or "web crawler

Web crawler

A Web crawler is a computer program that browses the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner or in an orderly fashion. Other terms for Web crawlers are ants, automatic indexers, bots, Web spiders, Web robots, or—especially in the FOAF community—Web scutters.This process is called Web...

") has been written from scratch specifically for this project.
Nutch originated with Doug Cutting

Doug Cutting

Douglass Read Cutting is an advocate and creator of open-source search technology. He originated Lucene and, with Mike Cafarella, Nutch, both open-source search technology projects which are now managed through the Apache Software Foundation. He holds a bachelor's degree from Stanford University....

, creator of both Lucene

Lucene

Apache Lucene is a free/open source information retrieval software library, originally created in Java by Doug Cutting. It is supported by the Apache Software Foundation and is released under the Apache Software License....

 and Hadoop

Hadoop

Apache Hadoop is a software framework that supports data-intensive distributed applications under a free license. It enables applications to work with thousands of nodes and petabytes of data...

, and Mike Cafarella.

In June, 2003, a successful 100-million-page demonstration system was developed.