lucene

Open-source Lucene threatens Microsoft, Google enterprise search

It must be depressing to be Microsoft these days.

You spend $1.2 billion to acquire enterprise search leader FAST in January 2008 and then another $100 million on semantic search vendor Powerset in July 2008, only to have the excellent Apache's Lucene, an open-source search project, and Solr, an enterprise search server based on Lucene, offer better performance at a 100 percent discount.

Not very sporting of the open-source community, now is it?

Granted, Lucene and Solr still lack some of the spit and polish that Microsoft FAST, Autonomy, Google's enterprise search appliance, and other proprietary competitors … Read more

CIA invests in open-source enterprise search

If any organization needs to make sense of unstructured data it's the government--especially agencies like the CIA and other intelligence groups that comb through a myriad of disparate information on an hourly basis.

Last week, In-Q-Tel, the technology arm of the CIA, invested in Lucid Imagination, which provides support, maintenance, and add-on software for Apache Lucene and Solr. According to Lucid, the Lucene/Solr technology is downloaded more than 9,000 times per day, and more than 4,000 organizations are using the software for enterprise search.

I've wondered aloud quite a few times as to whether or not open-source projects (and specifically Apache projects) can turn into businesses or if they are simply the cogs and wheels that make other products function better (aka the Oracle syndrome).

I probably would have argued that enterprise search would fall into one of those no-man's lands where the technology is important but not quite a standalone business. There has been a huge amount of venture capital investment in search but few big winners in the category.

But the investment from In-Q-Tel adds some credence to the value of the function as well as the technology in the respect that the government is actually using the software and not just making an investment as we see in the venture capital world. Lucene and Solr are "sufficiently complex" open-source products that require a commercial entity to support ongoing efforts once they are adopted. This gives Lucid a legitimate shot at building a business. … Read more

Lucid Imagination conjures up $6 million

If you were looking to create a start-up, and particularly an open-source start-up, you could hardly do better than to stumble upon a pre-existing open-source project with millions of downloads, widespread adoption by some of the biggest names in the industry, and a fast-growing enterprise need.

Take Lucene, for example, as CMS Watch's Kas Thomas noted on Monday. It is a hugely popular project with one big failing: no enterprise support. Writes Thomas:

Lucene has a lot going for it...(It's) one of the safest (open-source projects) around, in terms of governance and oversight (through the Apache Foundation), … Read more

LinkedIn and MySpace upgrade search with open-source Lucene

TechCrunch reports that LinkedIn just upgraded its people search, but fails to mention the technology behind the upgrade: Lucene, the open-source search project. Nor is LinkedIn alone: MySpace has also used Lucene to revamp its search functionality, as Ars Technica reported earlier in June.

Indeed, borrowing from open source is now standard operating procedure for Web companies. What is interesting in the use of Lucene is how the Web is branching beyond the familiar LAMP stack to build in technologies like Lucene, Yahoo!'s User Interface Library, and other open-source components.

Arguably, the Web could not exist without open-source software, … Read more