Hadoop: Funny Name, Powerful Software

Behind Yahoo’s push to open up Web search and advertising is software powerful enough to sort through the entire Library of Congress in less than half a minute. The software, called “Hadoop,” is part of Yahoo’s massive computing grid and is transforming the way that Yahoo and corporate giants like IBM extract meaning from enormous streams of data. Universities are also using the code — an open source version of software Google relies on for daily operation — to train a new generation of computer scientists and engineers.