Two initiatives, Udacity and Common Crawl, have been launched in the past several months. Udacity just started an online course for "Building a Search Engine". Udacity (please note they have other courses) was formed by a couple professors who had taught as part of the Stanford Online series. Like the Fall courses this appears to be a very, very, basic introduction. Python is used for the course. Common Crawl has scraped 5 billion web pages, and made their dataset available for free on Amazon's cloud (which has Hadoop, supports Map/Reduce, et al).
http://commoncrawl.org/common-crawl-on-aws-...
RSVPs will not be opened until a couple weeks beforehand at which time an email will be sent. The reason for this is the waitlist and no-shows situation coupled with the timing of the Udacity course. That is, the primary reason this event was posted end of February was to communicate Udacity's course offerings. The delay for RSVPing until closer to the event is to coincide towards the end of the course. At that point can see if this meetup makes sense.
The reason for this type of "Lean Meetup" event is that a couple weeks ago about 15 of us met to discuss the Map Reduce tutorial. No pizza or drinks - just folks in a room chatting about the tutorial for a couple hours. This test "Lean Meetup" derives from the success of that meeting. Also, for the Stanford Online Machine Learning class there was not critical mass for a local study group, and so rather than a weekly search engine class, this approximate date was chosen to be towards the end of Udacity's course.
The above is still fluid, and we can update it moving forward.
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