Lucene News & Articles

Welcome to the February installment of our what's coming from the open source CMS projects in the next month.

If you're looking through here and feel that your project was left out, we invite you to send us an email at pr@cmswire.com with a pointer to who we should contact at your project for updates.

The Apache Lucene Connector Framework (LCF) has reached the next stage toward becoming an official Apache (news, site) project.

In its recent research, CMS Watch (news, site) found that enterprise search buyers are increasingly turning to specialized search vendors, as they struggle to find the right solution.

CMS Watch's Search & Information Access subscription service shows specialized focus in specific environments (Microsoft, SAP, Oracle) or verticals (e.g. Recommind in legal sector).

While evaluating 23 enterprise search vendors (10- to 18-page comparative evaluations per each), the researchers also found that:

• Despite improvements in SharePoint search, Microsoft-focused organizations are still considering other alternatives (Coveo, SurfRay or ISYS).
• Rapidly growing repositories are making enterprise search harder.
• Larger vendors struggle to keep up with specialized search vendors (Sinequa, dtSearch and Vivisimo), who are quickly releasing connectors to various repositories.

The updated Search & Information Access report also looks into FAST, SharePoint search in 2010, Autonomy’s IDOL platform, open source Apache Lucene and Solar, and offers an updated industry "cross-check" chart with 2010 product developments and vendor changes.

You can either get a free sample or buy the full report here.

Many people are perfectly happy working directly with open source as it comes from the project that wrote it. Others prefer a bit more spit and polish. If you're in the second category, you might be interested to know that Lucid Imagination (news, site) has released a new version of its LucidWorks Certified Distribution for Lucene.

What LucidWorks Contains

LucidWorks for Lucene version 2.9.1 is free and includes:

• Apache Lucene 2.9.1
• An upgrade to all of the related utilities
• Version 0.9.9 of Luke, a development and diagnostic tool for working with Lucene indexes
• Additional testing performed by Lucid Imagination
• Additional bug fixes from the current trunk of the Lucene project
• The benefit of Lucid Imagination customer feedback
• Tools from Lucid Imagination to ease both Lucene installation and deployment
• Geographic-based search provided by the new Lucene Spatial contrib module

Why Lucene 2.9.1 Matters

If you haven't looked at Lucene 2.9, you're missing out on advanced numeric search and real-time search performance improvements. Tied together with Lucene Spatial, these additions can allow mobile users to do searches for, say, an Italian restaurant within five miles of where they currently are, and can get useful results thanks to the GPS in their mobile device and Lucene's quick handling of the information.

You can download LucidWorks now.

Any day now (if not already), the newest version of Apache's Solr (news, site) project hits the streets. A year in the making since the previous release, the Java-based, open source enterprise search server Solr 1.4 offers some exciting feature and performance improvements.

Apache Lucene (news, site), the popular open source search engine, is now available in version 2.9.0. This version is the last minor release before the big step to Lucene 3.0, but the developers didn't hold back all of their improvements for later.

Lucid Imagination (news, site) continues to show its (mainly dollar-amount-driven) support for open source Apache Lucene and Solr search technologies.

Recently, the company released a nifty (oh, and free) monitoring, performance and optimization tool called LucidGaze for Lucene.

The release of Kentico (news, site) CMS v4.1 sees a number of upgrades to the Czech ASP.NET-based Web CMS that go beyond the usual bug fixes associated with a one point step-up.

Principal amongst those are an upgraded search engine, enhanced multilingual features and a new interface that enables the easy upload and manipulation of images.

If we don’t sound excited -- or even surprised -- well, that’s what you get for outlining exactly what you are going to include in your next update five months before you do it. Keeping promises is good though. All that really remains is to see whether Kentico CMS 4.1 has everything promised.

What recession? That must be the question asked at Vyre (news, site) who has recorded a revenue rise of 81% compared to the first half of 2008 thanks to sales of its Unify CMS.

After allowing Acquia Search to simmer in over two hundred and fifty beta tester kitchens for a few months, Acquia (news, site) has taken the product and added it to its selection of hosted Acquia Network services.

Some technology partnership announcements make complete sense. Others leave you scratching your head as you try to decide what these people were thinking.

The announcement that Lucid Imagination (news, site) and ISYS Search Software (news, site) have partnered to combine their search technologies is fortunately not the latter.

Yes, the Central Intelligence Agency is among 18 U.S. Intelligence organizations to benefit from the Apache Lucene/Solr enterprise search technology.

In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s VC arm, has announced its investment into Lucid Imagination, a commercial provider of open source search technologies.

This may mean a lot of things (just scratching the surface here): great exposure for Apache (not bad of a present for the ASF’s 10th birthday), promotion of open source adoption, better data mining opportunities for the U.S. intelligence -- you name it.

Facebook and Google, interestingly, are also (indirectly) in the mix.

Perhaps in an attempt to compete with third-party vendors, more Web CMS vendors are offering site search services. CMS Watch reports that 40% of major Web CMS vendors now embed the open source Apache Lucene (news, site) search engine.

Open source offerings and associated services are getting better and starting to seem less risky, while IT budgets are shrinking. Result? What's bad for economy is clearly good for open source.

A recent survey shows that web content management is one of the prime "targets" for disruption by open source.

Open source vendors rejoice, closed source companies nod in agreement and utter the magic word "interoperability."

With DrupalCon well under way now, we are hearing a lot of announcements about new services and upcoming features and functionality for the web content management solution. One very interesting announcement is the official beta release of the new Acquia Search to the public.

A hosted search service for Drupal 6 websites, Acquia Search offers a number of advanced features that will help make your website hum with activity.