Replacing dtSearch is Easier than it Sounds

August 5, 2013

DtSearch is an interesting topic. Certainly once considered a high water mark for text retrieval systems, it has mostly fallen off the cultural radar. However, that hasn’t stopped one industrious company of…replacing it? We learned more from a recent Flax article, “An Open Source Replacement for the dtSearch Closed Source Search Engine.”

According to the story:

…we developed a new Lucene Analyzer that speaks the same syntax as dtSearch, allowing us to index text input. On the search side we have a Lucene QueryParser that shares this syntax. To make it easier to use we’ve wrapped the whole lot in a modified Solr server. As we needed some features of very recent Lucene code, our modifications are based on a patch to Lucene trunk.

Our best response here is, well, whoopee. Saying you’ve replaced dtSearch is like Chevy claiming it has replaced the horse and buggy with its 2014 model. Frankly, we weren’t aware of too many people still using that software. For goodness sake, a Google search only brought up a single news piece. Chances are most people moved on a long time ago, so we will be stunned to hear about anyone jumping for joy because of this open source option.

Patrick Roland, August 05, 2013

Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search

Comments

One Response to “Replacing dtSearch is Easier than it Sounds”

  1. Charlie Hull on August 5th, 2013 5:04 am

    Not exactly a recent article, as we posted it last year, but thanks for mentioning it. You might think that few are using dtSearch but we have a number of clients who were using it for monitoring up hundreds of thousands of news stories a day with tens of thousands of stored queries. The more interesting point is that the technique we used here can potentially be applied to *any* existing search engine, providing an open source upgrade path for those who can’t afford to rewrite their stored queries or interface layer, or to make their customers retrain. As you will know, there’s a lot of old search technology in active se out there so an economical way to replace it with something more maintainable and cutting-edge should be popular.

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