Spiral was a search engine for debs - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deb_(file_format), written in Python on top of Google App Engine infrastructure before its launch.

Spiral Features were:

• Able to crawl and index any given deb repository
• Upload and index data (originally in CSV format) to Google App Engine datastore
• Its own interface to delete set of records from the database (admin only)
• Ranking results by exact match, substring match and votes (as in popcon.debian.org)

We called spiral the parts composed by: a crawler, a bulk uploader and the ranking code. debspiral was the single user interface, an webapp.

Spiral is not being maintained anymore and was a proof of concept for bulkload and search module integration during Google App Engine initial development.