Hadoop got its start in Nutch. A few of us were attempting to build an open source
web search engine and having trouble managing computations running on even a
handful of computers. Once Google published its GFS and MapReduce papers, the
route became clear. They’d devised systems to solve precisely the problems we were
having with Nutch. So we started, two of us, half-time, to try to recreate these systems
as a part of Nutch.
