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solr

Why would a Googler use Solr for search?

Google is arguably the world's largest open-source company, not only releasing a minimum of 14 million lines of open-source code but also hosting over 250,000 open-source projects on Google Code, in addition to its open-source advocacy work like Summer of Code.

Despite these open-source bona fides, it's still surprising to see someone at Google adopting Solr, an open-source search server based on Apache Lucene, for its All for Good site.

Google is the world's search market leader by a very long stretch. Why not use its own search technology? Why use Solr?

Google's Public Sector … Read more

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

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