Solr News & Articles

Having content that no one can find, not even your own users, is useless. Every Web CMS project and company has to face this issue at some point. What to do about search?

These days, many come to exactly the same answer.

Lucid Imagination (news, site), a company that provides commercial support and services around the open source Apache Lucene (news, site) and Apache Solr (news, site), announced that it received its Series B funding.

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 Solr, 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.

Are you the type that just uses sites like MTV.co.uk, or are you more one to stare at it and try to figure out what it's running? I could say that it's running Drupal (news, site), which it is, but the answer isn't quite that simple.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

 Alterian, a leader in providing marketing services and system integrations, is possibly making progress with its recent acquisition of web content management systems vendor Mediasurface. Recently, the company made strides with the integration of Dynamic Messenger with Immediacy and Morello.

Iron Mountain have been making some notable noise recently about evolving their tape-storage business into other, more dynamic content management and records management services. Just to let us know they’re serious about their new direction, they’ve gone and snapped up leading hospital records management firm RMS Services USA Ltd., for an undisclosed amount.