Hadoop, as you may have noticed, has a very cute, yellow elephant mascot. That elephant is a very apt representation of what Hadoop deals with, namely large amounts of data.
We’re talking about petabytes here. Hadoop’s end goal is to store and process these petabytes of data that’s been distributed across a lot of computers and use it for search purposes. The open source project is currently being backed by Yahoo in hopes that it will gain the top position in the search field. Basically, Hadoop wants to out-Google Google. Hadoop, in order to accomplish its goals, utilizes MapReduce and HDFS to divide applications into smaller work blocks. HFDS creates replicas of those blocks for redundancy purposes, and places them on compute nodes so Mapreduce can process the data. All of this is to say, that Hadoop is good at what it does, and could potentially contribute to Google’s wane.
Lucene.apache.org/hadoop/ In Their Own Words
“Hadoop is a software platform lets one easily write and run applications that process vast amounts of data. Here’s what makes Hadoop especially useful:
• Scalable: Hadoop can reliably store and process petabytes.
• Economical: It distributes the data and processing across clusters of commonly available computers. These clusters can number into the thousands of nodes.
• Efficient: By distributing the data, Hadoop can process it in parallel on the nodes where the data is located. This makes it extremely rapid.
• Reliable: Hadoop automatically maintains multiple copies of data and automatically redeploys computing tasks based on failures.”
Why Lucene.apache.org/hadoop/ It Might Be A Killer
Hadoop’s got high hopes. Getting Yahoo support is big news. They have, potentially, the power to defeat Google, and that, is indeed a grand task.
Some Questions About Lucene.apache.org/hadoop/
Will Hadoop be able to defeat the Goliath that is Google? Is it really a major threat? 
