LucidWorks Opens Marketplace for Add-Ons to Solr Search Engine

This week, LucidWorks announced its Solr Marketplace for pre-built add-ons that enhance open source enterprise search capabilities in existing applications.

Solr, part of the open-source Apache Lucene project, is an enterprise search platform, and Redwood City, California-based LucidWorks has built applications and modules on top of it. The marketplace, the first of its kind, contains add-ons created by LucidWorks and its partners that are designed to readily add search-functionality without coding. At launch, nearly three dozen are available, and most are available -- for an unspecified but limited time -- for free.

Add-Ons: Entity Recognition, Business Rules

Will Hayes, LucidWorks’ chief product officer, said in a statement that the company has worked for years “with developers across the globe” to build search experiences for customers, and now the Marketplace is “democratizing the magic of search.”

The add-ons include four that are also available within the LucidWorks Search development platform. LucidWorks Entity Recognition adds intelligence beyond keyword search, such as classifying common patterns into predefined categories like names of persons, and the LucidWorks Relevancy Workbench is designed for experimenting with different search parameters.

The company is also providing Business Rules, an integration with open source business rules engine Drools so that, for instance, queries can be routed to different pages because of context or user profiles, and Splunk for monitoring search deployments in near real-time or for looking at historical data mining.

Partner Companies

Contributing partners include Avalon, Basis Technology, Deep Web Technologies, Documill, Lexalytics, Raritan Technologies, Raytion, Search Technologies, Sematext, Smartlogic and Wand. Partner companies are provided with access to LucidWork’s search and Big Data experts, as well as with opportunities for marketing and training.

The partners’ contributions include Smartlogic’s Semaphore, which enhances Solr-equipped apps by automatically adding metadata to the search index to increase the precision of search results. Wand’s Taxonomies offers a predefined set of business metadata for tagging content, and the Raytion SharePoint 2010 Connector retrieves SharePoint documents and accompanying metadata, and sends them to the search engine for indexing.

The enterprise search market is steadily growing, with industry research firm Gartner predicting a US$ 1.89 billion market in 2013, up from US$ 1.69 billion last year.