Open Source Search: Momentum Building
May 10, 2012
It has happened.
The self-appointed experts have discovered open source search, reveals CIO in “Wide-Open Search.” With exponentially growing amounts of data to contend with, organizations from Twitter and Facebook to the Library of Congress are turning to open source solutions. Such groups, Stacy Collett writes:
“. . . venture into the seemingly untamed world of open-source search applications, not just for the cost savings, but also for the ability to customize and modify applications quickly. Plus, open source has an active community that can help solve related problems.”
All true. Collett points to Lucene, developed by Lucid Imagination, as her open source example, which seems like a good choice to us. She emphasizes that Lucene is a formidable application built for enterprises with sophisticated search needs. Smaller-scale tools based on Lucene are also available, like Elasticsearch.
Lucid Imagination provides an enterprise open source search solution as well as consulting and engineering services. Lucene Solr leads the field in independent enterprise search platforms, with 200,000 to 300,000 downloads per month. As other search application vendors get snapped up by the giant companies, Lucid relies on adaptability. The write up informs us:
“Lucid Imagination plans to move into the business intelligence and data warehousing spaces and enable integration with big-data technologies, [Lucid CEO Paul] Doscher says. ‘If you put traditional data warehouse or business intelligence-type applications on top of Hadoop, in some instances, it’s almost like trying to take this manhole cover of opportunity and shove it through a garden hose,’ he says.”
Nice metaphor.
We’re okay with Lucid, but he mid-tier consultants. . . . Well, mid-tier exists for a reason. You can get profiles of key open source search vendors for free by clicking on the Profiles link at our sister information service, OpenSearchNews.com.
Cynthia Murrell, May 10, 2012
Sponsored by HighGainBlog
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Lucene isn’t developed by Lucid Imagination (the CIO article makes the same mistake) – it’s an open source project managed by the Apache Foundation. Lucid do however employ a number of the project committers and provide services and their own wrapper around Lucene/Solr.
Hi,
Two remarks:
1. Lucene is absolutely not developed by Lucid Imagination… far from that actually. As Charlie stated above, it’s an ASF project in which many developers are involved from different companies. Lucene and Solr are “officially” one project, but even so, there is quite a clear devision of work between the committers on this project – some solely focus on Solr and the others solely focus on Lucene (there are just a few guys that work on both). Lucid indeed employs a big chunk of the developers that work on Solr… but that’s certainly not the case when it comes to Lucene. So this whole perception that Lucid plays a big part in Lucene development should actually be put down as a myth.
2. ElasticSearch could not be further than just a “smaller scale tool”. It’s a highly distributed search engine which is based on Lucene and outperforms Solr in every aspect – vertical/horizontal scalability, distributed search, feature richness, search performance, indexing performance, and more… In fact, if anything, Solr is trying to catch up with it (the so called Solr-Cloud is an attempt to copy every single functionality from ElasticSearch right down to the distributed model level). The Lucene community and developers are also split… there are quite a few Lucene committers which choose ElasticSearch over Solr. It is the case that quite a few Lucene committers simply don’t believe in Solr. But it doesn’t stop there.. ES has seen tremendous momentum in the last couple of years and quite a few high profile companies (including big social media companies) are migrating from Solr to ElasticSearch for these exact reasons.
Just to put things in the right perspective…
Cheers