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, which is why I continue to believe it's critical that we find ways to encourage open-source contributions in a Web world that isn't bound by Open Source 1.0's licensing. It's therefore unfortunate that the Web lacks the "Software 1.0"'s licensing restrictions.
Perhaps the market will sort all this out, with Google and others seeing a strategic interest in open-source contributions, despite a lack of compulsion from open-source licensing. Perhaps. I guess we'll just have to wait and see.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
http://thenoisychannel.com/2008/11/25/linkedins-new-search-platform-a-review/
I checked out your blog post about the new LinkedIn search support - it seems that your major complaint is the lack of faceted search, for exploratory browsing.
I agree that would be a welcome enhancement to LinkedIn, but I'd have to disagree that it's hard to do with Lucene. Solr (another open source Apache project) supports this out-of-the-box, and it's totally built on top of Lucene. While there are situations that cause performance to suffer, it's been steadily improving and feels more than ready for prime time.
-- Ken