Lucidimagination

Search for first responders: Interview with Forensic Logic CTO Ron Mayer

Search has certainly played a prominent role in national security, with much discussion across many channels on the information frontier, whether it’s about finding the needle in a haystack in Social Media or comparing spellings of different ‘persons of i... Read >

Lucene/Solr open source search applications cut costs by half

If you have used Open Source Apache Lucene/Solr search, you have likely seen first hand how you can achieve better, faster results with greater flexibility, at lower cost, for your search applications. As it turns out, it’s not just you. Recent research ... Read >

It’s an open source thing …

One of the things I’ve always enjoyed most about heterodox cities like New York, San Francisco, Paris, London, Berlin, Jerusalem — several of which I’ve had the privilege of living in — is the mix of ethnic groups. They’re highly visible, irreducibly fixe... Read >

What’s a “DisMax”?

The term “dismax" gets tossed around on the Solr lists frequently, which can be fairly confusing to new users. It originated as a shorthand name for the DisMaxRequestHandler (which I named after the DisjunctionMaxQueryParser, which I named after the Disju... Read >

Debugging Search Application Relevance Issues

Many people focus purely on the speed of search, often neglecting the quality of the results produced by the system. In most cases, people test out some small set of queries, eyeball the top five or ten and then declare the system good enough. In other ca... Read >

Full Text Search Engines vs. DBMS

Introduction Full text search engines and relational databases each have unique strengths as development tools but also have overlapping capabilities. Both can provide for storage and update of data and both support search of the data. Full text system... Read >

Open Source myths: “Open Source search needs more assistance”

Does open source Lucene/Solr require more outside assistance than comparable commercial products? No. (I’m tempted to stop there, but that’s not quite fair.) That was, in essence, a question posed by Daniel Tunkelang on his blog in his commentary on ... Read >

The high bar for relevancy?

A big chunk of the billions that go to search-engine marketing and search engine optimization, SEM and SEO, (mostly to you-know-who) are spent on getting to Page 1 of the results. I won’t be the first to point out that relevance for in-house search — ... Read >

Content is the platform, open source is the medium, search is the interface

First, Adobe, famous for tools for making your content look good — from Flash to Photoshop, from the hoary Postscript and its modern analogue, Acrobat PDF — is now investing aggressively in a content platform to manage the stuff you want to make look good... Read >

The Apache Lucene Ecosystem: My View of 2010

After a week off to enjoy time with my family, I thought I would kick off the last week of 2010 with a look back at the year as it relates to the Apache Lucene ecosystem. For anyone who follows the amalgamation of projects that I like to call the Lucene ... Read >

Solr and LucidWorks Enterprise: When to use each

In today's world, building the perfect product is a lot like trying to repair a set of train tracks while the train is barreling down on you. The world just keeps moving, with great ideas and new possibilities tempting you every day. And to make things wo... Read >

Real-time Search With Lucene

Real-time search is kind of a fuzzy concept, but basically it means dropping the time a modification to an index takes to be seen by users to a near negligible quantity – or a small enough time difference to be acceptable for a given real-time application... Read >

Apache Solr 1.5 With More “Functionality”

I’m particularly excited about a few things: 1. Massive scalability capabilities via distributed search, indexing and shard management – Up until now, Solr scales pretty well on the search side (I’ve seen billion document instances and we’ve benchmarke... Read >

Open Source: Business Model, Development Method, or Social Network?

Ashlee Vance’s insightful piece in Monday’s NYTimes on the implications of the wrangling between the EU and Larry Ellison over Sun and MySQL lit up a lot of conversation in open source circles. And with Open Source reaching something like a ten-year mark ... Read >

Open Source: Whiter Teeth, Fresher Breath?

David M. Fishman Some years ago, when open source was the fairly-long-haired hairshirt scruffy shorts-wearing barbarian at the gate, there was real sturm-und-drang around droll, berkeley-esque phrases like “copy-left" and “viral licensing", enough to mak... Read >