cominvent

Some of you read my previous posts The state of open source search. I will in this post go through the process of downloading, installing, configuring and using Apache SOLR to index some sample XML data and search it.

This is the first post in a series, where each new post will explore some new feature. We will simply follow the tutorial to get SOLR up and running locally.

We start by visiting the SOLR Tutorial for the first steps, and simply get the app running:

1. Check Java version, download SOLR (I chose this file), unpack it, and cd to apache-solr-1.2.0/example
2. java -jar start.jar
3. Visit http://localhost:8983/solr/admin/ to see the admin page with a simple test GUI
4. Try hit the search button, you get the XML response back with 0 results
5. Now try indexing some content. CD to example/exampledocs
6. java -jar post.jar solr.xml monitor.xml
7. Now try searching again and see that you get some hits!

For part two we will get SOLR running in a Tomcat instance, customize the schema a bit and present search results in a custom web page using the client API.

Today, the deal where Microsoft buys FAST, was completed. That means that the Norwegian search engine vendor Fast Search & Transfer is now a fully owned subsidiary of Microsoft.

The FAST ESP product will continue to be offered on all current platforms, and the FAST sales and tech organization continues to operate almost as before, so customers and users will not experience any noise around this transaction.

FAST, when under the MS umbrella, will of course increase focus within the MS Office Sharepoint segment, and will together with MS engineers make an even smoother packaging of the technologies to new and existing customers of high-end Sharepoint sites with large data volumes.

Expect to see continued innovation from FAST in the years to come, and expect also to see a shift towards stronger support for the Windows platform. It is a known fact that the Linux platform has been the most stable up until now for ESP, but now this might shift as Windows versions will get the major focus in QA and patching.

Let us not hope that the Linux, AIX and Solaris versions will be discontinued. I don’t expect that to happen in the short term, as the press release clearly states that they will be supported, and also this blog post by MS’s Kirk Koenigsbauer in the Sharepoint division states that “We’re making a pragmatic decision to continue to delight a core part of FAST’s customer base that has chosen the Linux/UNIX OS. You can bet that we’ll innovate on Windows, too, and over time we hope customers will see .NET as a preferred platform choice“. Let’s hope that lasts for many many years to come, so that history can be re-written in this area.

Congratulations, Microsoft, with an excellent new member organization

Congratulations, John Marcus Lervik with the new role of leading MS’s Enterprise Search Business!

See also official press release and FAST’s customer FAQ

In this blog post, Sesam annonces that their middleware architecture, Sesam Search Application Toolkit (SESAT) is released as open source software. This is the piece of software (written in Java) which sits between the portal (such as sesam.no) and the data sources (such as FAST ESP, Yahoo! or a database) and dispatches in parallel a single user query into multiple underlying requests and returns everything according to business rules. This is often referred to as federated search.

Here’s Sesam’s own description of the software:

“SESAT is search middleware and a search portal framework. SESAT enables a single user query to be dispatched to multiple information sources. The result is analysed, weighted and presented to the user according to configurable business rules.”

Congratulations with contributing to Open Source, Sesam! And good luck with creating a community around this important piece of middleware, we’ll see more and more demand for it in the future!

Now, go check it out on http://sesat.no/ if this is something that can be useful to you!

PS: Learn more about other federated search solutions at the federatedsearchblog.com