Having acquired the search engine company IndexTank back in October, LinkedIn has made good on the promise it made at the time of the acquisition and has now released the code for IndexTank's technologies as open source. Aimed at developers and system administrators, IndexTank provides a hosted service for searching a web site or application. It is best known for being the search engine used by Reddit.

According to the announcement from LinkedIn, IndexTank consists mainly of three components: the search and indexing engine itself, which separates relevance signals from the text in a document; the API, which allows access to the services from Java, Python, .NET, Ruby and PHP; and, Nebulizer, a framework for hosting and managing "an unlimited number of indexes running over a layer of Infrastructure-as-a-Service". The announcement notes that most users will not need the third of those.

The source code is available to download on GitHub for the Engine and the Service; the latter includes the API, Nebulizer and other components. The code is made available under the terms of the Apache 2.0 License.

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