Hosted SOLR or Lucene service
January 28, 2007
Just putting the question out to the blogosphere (love that word!) - is there any interest in a hosted Lucene or SOLR search service? It may be something that is a non-starter, given that google and atomz have wrapped up a ‘hosted web search’ market segment already, but perhaps not. Most people need to search through their web data, true, but google/atomz/etc search the content after its published. Would there be much/any benefit in being able to index/search data before it’s published to the web (perhaps with extra meta data not necessarily easily publishable)? Or perhaps searching data that is used for other, non-web-publishing activities? Just throwing it out there - drop me a line if you’re interested in taking this further.
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Posted in Database, Development, Ideas, Java, Software, Web, opensource
January 29th, 2008 at 7:34 am
It’s so strange that searching for “hosted solr” on Google only returns this blog. I’d have thought there’d be millions of hosted Solr solutions out there already, or at least more mention of the idea.
It could be great! As long as you can make it scalable, reliable and secure. Having it based on an Amazon Web Services style pricing model would also be ideal. The pay-for-what-you-use model is the way forward.
January 29th, 2008 at 8:23 am
It’s *probably* because SOLR itself is relatively easy to get set up for people already, so a managed/hosted version isn’t all that important to most people. *OR* people consider their needs to be so custom that ‘generic’ hosting might not suffice. Hadoop throws another curve in to the equation as well, I think too. However, being able to easily use a pre-set up Solr/Hadoop combination that can grow/scale as you need it would probably be a better value proposition. Or, as you said before, the EC2-style.