13. The Pre-Groonga Era#
By Naozumi Takenaka (Founder and current CEO of Mirai Kensaku - meaning Future Search - Brazil)
December 2024
13.1. The Internet Landscape at that time#
Around 2003, as Google’s dominance in internet search became established, many major Japanese services including Yahoo! Japan began adopting Google’s search engine. The development of Groonga originated when NTT’s goo search service made the business decision to abandon their proprietary search engine and crawler system.
At the time, it was clear not only to engineers but also to many users who viewed the internet as a cultural phenomenon that search engines were an indispensable technology for finding relevant information among the explosively growing content post-internet. Search engines had the potential to not just control but fundamentally change user behavior online.
From a software engineering perspective, search engines are a complex bundle of critical technologies including tokenization, tree construction, indexing methods, performance optimization for each component, and multilingual support - not something that can be achieved with half-hearted efforts. The same applies to crawler technology. Japanese language processing in particular presents numerous challenges absent in Western languages, such as tokenization, verb conjugation variations, mixed character sets, and kanji variants. Search engine technology for Japanese builds upon detailed technical expertise accumulated since the personal computer era. As an engineer working in the Japanese language sphere, I felt an urgent sense of crisis seeing this technological accumulation being casually discarded in favor of “foreign-made” engines. The “Google is good enough” decision in 2003 exemplified how software was being treated as merely a commodity in Japan’s internet business landscape, with little regard for its cultural aspects and value.
13.2. The Birth of Brazil Inc. and Senna#
To counter this situation, Mirai Kensaku - meaning Future Search - Brazil LLC (hereinafter “Brazil”) was founded. Due to legal requirements at the time mandating minimum capital of 10 million yen for stock companies, we opted for an LLC structure with 3 million yen in capital. One of the founders, Hiroyuki Nishimura, was then the administrator and developer of 2channel (2ch), which lacked comprehensive cross-board search functionality - there were only a few volunteer-run services offering limited search capabilities. This presented an opportunity to repurpose NTT’s soon-to-be-abandoned search engine technology for 2ch.
For about two years after establishing Brazil, we built the 2ch search service using NTT’s licensed search engine software (eva) while simultaneously conceptualizing and developing an entirely new, original search engine. During this period, we also established our commitment to open source, which continues to this day. This new engine was named Senna - combining Brazil’s “Brazil” connection with an emphasis on speed. While many pronounced it “sen-na”, the correct pronunciation is “se-na” given this background.
Around 2005, Livedoor was at its peak in Japan, with CEO Takafumi Horie publicly expressing his desire to build a search service that could compete with Google. Brazil saw this as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and planned to extend Senna with distributed server support and other features to create a large-scale search service that could match Google’s speed and accuracy at the time. While these plans were ultimately derailed by the Livedoor incident in 2006, their implementation might have altered the course of the internet history.
13.3. The Evolution to Groonga#
Shortly after Senna went into operation, one of Brazil’s founders, Daijiro Mori, exemplified the programming adage that “you should write the same software three times” by initiating the development of Groonga as the third iteration. Throughout this period, Brazil maintained its clear vision of preserving pure Japanese search engine technology for the future.
Regarding Groonga’s name, Mori provided the true story:
I named it Groonga after being strongly impressed by something Hideya Adachi of Fukuoka’s progressive band ‘Takenouchi Quartet’ told me - that tracing the origins of the blue note scale leads to Grunga village in East Africa.
This naming approach differed completely from Senna’s - perhaps we could have renamed the company to “Future Search Africa” at that point :-)
Subsequently, we decided to not just make it open source but to entrust development to the community, believing this would enable multifaceted, evolutionary development unrestricted by Brazil’s internal resources - including debugging, feature expansion, and documentation enhancement. This led to strengthening links with various developers, including ClearCode Inc.
I’ll end this section hoping that contributors will continue writing this history.