Lemur FLAX: Clever Search Beastie Interview
July 8, 2008
No, I did not interview a real lemur. I tracked down Charlie Hull, one of the wizards driving Lemur Consulting forward. The company makes the open source Xapian information retrieval available as the open source FLAX search engine. Lemur, like Tesuji and dozens of other companies, has tapped the power of open source search and content processing software and crafted a successful business.
FLAX, according to Mr. Hull scales. In an exclusive interview for ArnoldIT.com’s Search Wizards Speak series, he said:
The core technology was originally built to search a collection of 500 million Web pages, and scales easily to over four billion items. We’ve implemented indexes of 30-100 million items on a single standard server. It’s also extremely fast to search a Flax database. We routinely see sub-second retrieval times.
You can see the search system in action at MyDeco.com, a UK-based ecommerce site here.
What I found interesting is the by making FLAX available as open source, the company has generated new customers for the firm’s technical consulting and engineering services. Mr. Hull said:
Our view is that any enterprise search system will necessitate some degree of installation, integration or customization – so a customer will always pay for services. However, with open-source you don’t have to pay any license fees on top. In today’s economic climate this cost saving is more and more important. We’ve seen year-on-year growth of the business, as well as a dawning realization that our open-source approach puts the control back in the hands of the customer – you don’t have to take our word for it that the ‘black box’ of enterprise search is working, you have complete visibility and control over the search system.
Mr. Hull’s secret sauce is technical expertise. The company adds a special ingredient that keeps the company on the fast-track–customer service. The firm prides itself on servicing its customers needs.
In an era when “customer support” means “Don’t bother us,” Lemur is an animal with a clever way to snare clients. You can read the full interview here.
Stephen Arnold, July 8, 2008
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