Lucid Imagination News & Articles

Lucid Imagination (news, site) has survived their first year of business with flying colors. That is, the enterprise search company reported that they more than tripled in size over the last 12 months.

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.

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.

Many enterprise companies have greatly benefited from the evolution of Apache’s open source Lucene and Solr enterprise search solutions. With over 4,000 installations of Lucene and names such as Netflix, Alfresco and MySpace using it, it’s easy to understand the impact that is has had.

As with many open source projects though, there was no guaranteed support. There was nowhere to go for quick answers, easy customization and troubleshooting. Until now that is. Lucid Imagination aims to solve to issues that surround the fastest growing enterprise search solutions today.