Tonight I met someone from a (largish) local company and learned they’re migrating their search functionality to SOLR. This is the second largish company in the area I know that’s migrating to SOLR. I’m not naming names only because I’m not sure they’d want me to do so. Suffice it to say these are names fairly well known in the marketing and communications industries.
I’m not surprised at all by the adoption, as SOLR makes it pretty easy to get started using the power of Lucene without requiring you to do a lot of setup or administration up front. These ‘sane defaults’, as I believe Erik Hatcher put it to me, are what give projects like SOLR a competitive advantage against even commercial offerings. Whether technology is good or bad is often secondary to whether it’s easy to get it to a testing stage.
If you’re using SOLR, what was the deciding factor? Ease of setup? Flexibility? Compatibility with existing Lucene data?
If you’re not using SOLR for your data search needs, what are you using? Raw Lucene? Xapian? Sphinx? A commercial product? If so, which one?
P.S If you’re not sure how to go about implementing search for your site and have some questions, email me – mgkimsal@gmail.com.
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