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.
I'm currently working on a book for web freelancers, covering everything you need to know to get started or just get better. Want to stay updated? Sign up for my mailing list to get updates when the book is ready to be released!
Possible book project – open source search
I’ve had a book project in the back of my mind for a bit. Though there’s never enough hours in the day to get everything done I need to, I have one book I’m wrapping up in the next few days, and am seriously considering committing myself to this next one. No publisher lined up yet or anything of that nature, but if I can’t find one I’d self publish through lulu.com.
The title obviously gives it away – I’m looking at doing a book on open source search products. I was thinking of doing an entire book on SOLR last fall, but honestly I’m not sure there’s enough about SOLR to write an entire book – at least not without repeating a lot of the information already out there in tutorials and what not. And I’m not sure that another deep in-depth technical book is necessary on something that’s moving so fast. The idea was to give a moderately-deep (but not overly deep, if you can make that distinction) look at setting up and using a group of open source search projects out there.
- Lucene is the leader in this space, without question. It’s been around for quite a while, and keeps getting better with each release. However, Lucene itself is very low-level, and Java only. Many implementations of Lucene have sprung up, such as Lucene.Net and Lucy, as well as tools which build on Lucene like SOLR and Nutch.
- PostgreSQL has full text search capabilities which I plan to explore in more detail.
- MySQL has had a degree of full text search capabilities for years, and the Sphinx project has emerged over the last couple of years to provide even more functionality and speed. I believe Sphinx is essentially standalone but can be coupled with MySQL or PostgreSQL – again, that’s research fodder for the book.
Are there other open source search projects that you’d be interested in seeing covered in a book? Is this a topic you see any demand or interest in? Whenever I see a gap in the book market, I always wonder if it’s because there’s no interest, or just that no one has filled the gap yet. Usually something appears to fill that gap a few months after I notice it, but I’ve yet to see this gap filled after almost a year of thinking about it.
Feedback?
I'm currently working on a book for web freelancers, covering everything you need to know to get started or just get better. Want to stay updated? Sign up for my mailing list to get updates when the book is ready to be released!
