Lucidworks: Beyond Search for Sure
January 9, 2020
Lucid Imagination experienced what DarkCyber recalls as a bit of turmoil. From the git go, there was tension in the open sourcey ranks. One of the founders was unceremoniously given an opportunity to find his future elsewhere. Then there was the game of Revolving Door Presidents. Next was the defection of some lucid thinkers to Amazon, not in Seattle but just up the 101 to some non descript buildings. Like a law of nature another round of presidential revolving doors. Along the way, more investors wrote checks for what was an open source play based on Lucene/Solr. (I know that writing the two “names” together does not capture the grandiosity of the conception of community supported search and the privately held companies efforts to create a huge, billion dollar information access business. Sigh.
Now Lucidworks (which I automatically interpret as the phrase “Lucidworks. Really?”) has acquired an eCommerce vendor. Hello, what’s happening Magento, Mercado, Shopify, and Amazon. Yep, Amazon. But doesn’t Amazon have search too? Trivial point. Lucidworks is going to turn the $200 million in investment capital, an interface scripting engine, open source software, and Cirrus10 (an ecommerce service provider) into billions. Yes, billions!
According to “Lucidworks Acquires Cirrus10, Global Ecommerce Service Provider, to Deepen Domain Expertise and Become a Leader in Digital Commerce Solutions” states:
Lucidworks, leader in AI-powered search, acquires Cirrus10, ecommerce solutions expert with more than 100 ecommerce customers. Lucidworks and Cirrus10 have worked together as partners for the past two years and now combine their domain expertise to provide more targeted solutions for different domains in the fast-moving ecommerce market.
The Yahoo news story points out that Lucidworks’ secret sauce is a system:
produces relevant results, recommends products that meet customer goals, and predicts shopper intent to create a more engaging experience.
And don’t forget artificial intelligence. AI! Obviously.
But whose AI? The answer appears to be AI from Cirrus10. DarkCyber noted this statement from a co founder of the ecommerce service provider:
“Fusion is the world’s only platform for extensible AI-driven search. Fusion elevated our service offerings by giving us a framework for exploring machine learning with our customers, and using it, we can build personalized and scalable relevancy models without a black box or army of data scientists. By combining Lucidworks search and AI expertise with our deep experience in the ecommerce space we can cement our role as digital commerce solution leaders.”—Peter Curran, Cirrus10
What appears to be the business strategy for Lucidworks is to get something that generates sustainable revenue, allows the company to upsell Cirrus10’s customers, and differentiate Lucidworks from the competitors in plain old search.
There are competitors; for example, outfits with venture capital backers demanding results (Algolia, Coveo). Also, open sourcey solutions (Drupal Commerce, Magento Community Edition) and small, feisty outfits like SLI Systems and EasyAsk). Note: This is a partial list. I almost forget companies like Amazon, eBay, and Google.
DarkCyber interprets the “beyond search” phrase as an attempt to make a 12 year old company into a revenue and profit machine.
DarkCyber, which is an annex to our blog Beyond Search, wishes the clear thinkers a great 2020. The question “Lucidworks. Really?” could be answered as long as AI, NLP, machine learning, open source, and synergy produce a winner, not a horse designed by a committee.
Stephen E Arnold, January 9, 2019
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Great discussion! I had to write to recommend you talk to National Geographic Explorer Albert Lin. Lost his leg in a car accident, psilocybin cured his phantom limb pain in one session, and now he’s back to traveling the world, has a new series on searching for lost cities with modern technology, and is doing all kinds of amazing work (including looking at how psychedelics can be used to treat chronic pain conditions). Sure you’d have many, many things to talk about!