When I started working for Findwise two years ago, Apache Solr was one of those no-name search platforms. We could barely get our customers to consider Solr even after proving that the platform would be a perfect match for their business needs. As time passed and the financial crisis hit the world, a few of our customers started considering Solr, but then usually for the reason that it was “free” – not for the functionality of the platform.
Things have changed. More and more companies now offer support and training for Solr. It seems that the platform is gaining momentum on the enterprise market. In fact, I was just in Oslo, Norway to become a certified Lucid Imagination training partner, as the need for training is growing rapidly, even up here in the snow-covered Nordics.
Today we even have customers approaching us asking questions about how, and not if, they should use Solr. I wouldn’t have imagined that two years ago …
Could this be the year that Solr goes head to head with the large enterprise search platforms? And where will we be in another two years? I wish I knew.
Solr has indeed established itself in last couple of years.Major reason Solr has gained significant support from companies should surely be due to it’s advanced searching techniques providing user with better searching options.Not only this but Solr’s technology integrations with FAST & Nutch should see Solr continuing it’s progress path.Recently I reviewed the complete reference guide of Solr’s updated version at http://www.lucidimagination.com/Downloads/LucidWorks-for-Solr/Reference-Guide , which was quite knowledgeable.
Thank you for the comment,
and yes, the Lucid Imagination homepage is full of knowledgeable articles.
which are the others ‘large enterprise search platforms’?
Hi Paulo,
To answer your question. In our opinion these 3 are the ‘large enterprise search platforms’
* Microsoft’s FAST search (former FAST ESP)
* Autonomy IDOL
* IBM Omnifind (especially the new upcoming Lucene based version)
There are of course a whole lot more vendors on the levels below, for example Google GSA but these three stand out (together with Solr) as the real major ones when it comes to functionality, scalability and so on…
Hope that answers your question.
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