Lucid Imagination Conference Full of Insights
May 21, 2012
The powerful advantages of open source search solutions are still new to many who would embrace them. That’s one of the conclusions to be drawn from O’Reilly Radar’s “Lucene Conference Touches Many Areas of Growth in Search.” Presenters at Lucid Imagination’s recent conference, Lucene Revolution, detailed those advantages as well as new developments in the field.
Sign-up stats indicate that many of the attendees were new to Lucene and Solr, with about a third having experienced them for less than one year. It sounds like there’s a lot of room for the technologies to grow.
There is more information in the article than I can go into here, so you might want to check it out for yourself. Writer and conference attendee Andy Oram shares some of the highlights regarding big data:
“Mark Davis did a fast-pace presentation on the use of Solr along with Hadoop, and systems hosting GPUs at the information processing firm Kitenga. A RESTful API from LucidWorks Enterprise gives Solr access to Hadoop to run jobs. Glenn Engstrand described how Zoosk, The “Romantic Social Network,” keeps slow operations on the update side of the operation so that searches can be simple and fast. As in many applications, Solr at Zoosk pulls information from MySQL. Other tools they use include the High-speed ObjectWeb Logger (HOWL) to log transactions and RabbitMQ for auto-acknowledge messages. HOWL is also useful for warming Solr’s cache with recent searches, because certain operations flush the cache. “
We welcome another big data development revealed at the conference: LucidWorks Big Data platform, now in Beta, will allow users to manage Solr schemas without having to configure and certify the local tools. Now, there’s a time saver. Lucid vows that the platform can handle any “volume, variety, and velocity” of content.
Auto-completion warranted its own presentation, wherein Sudarshan Gaikaiwari focused on geospatially informed results. Geohashes are used to retrieve geospatial info. They represent the world’s grid as arbitrary strings, where shorter strings represent larger regions and adding characters narrows the search to smaller area. Using these, applications can suggest auto-completed terms local to the user, like a nearby museum or restaurant.
Oram notes that Apache‘s Lucene is probably the most popular independent search engine. Written in Java, it can be used for nearly any full-text search application, particularly cross-platform. The engine boasts low memory requirements, fast incremental indexing, and an array of query types.
Conference sponsor Lucid Imagination is the commercial company for Lucene and its search server Solr. The company crafts robust scalable search solutions that make the most of the open source technology. Lucid prides itself on making open source search accessible and easy to learn. These search gurus recently moved to new digs in Redwood City, CA.
Cynthia Murrell, May 21, 2012
Sponsored by HighGainBlog
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