CIA to invest in Lucid Imagination

The Norwegian IT newspaper Digi.no today writes that CIA invests in Lucid Imagination through the company In-Q-Tel. This is a great confirmation that the Apache Lucene/Solr search engine is high-end software of key value also for intelligence use. That would come as no surpise to us who have followed Lucene for some time. And perhaps

A week of Lucene & Solr

I was in SF, California last week to dig deeper into Solr and to meet with its core developers (now working for Lucid Imagination). It was a great week with many new connections and new insight.

lucid-imagination-logoFirst of all, as you may know, Lucid Imagination is at the moment the primary commercial marketers, promotors and evangelists for Solr. They bring to the scene what an open source offering often lacks – a professional and polished image, nice wrapping and not least – commercial support. That is great for the future adoption of Solr with customers that need just that kind of safety. Being Lucid’s Norwegian parner, Cominvent AS now offers all of this in Norway as well.

Bing – first thoughts

picture-1Microsoft’s new search engine “Bing” which replaces Live Search, promises to be a decision engine rather than a search engine. Cominvent has tried it.
The front page of “Bing” is nice looking. I’m in Alexandria, and want to decide how to get from Alexandria to Hurghada, so I type “how to get from alexandria to hurghada”. The result set is a non-impressive boring listing of results, with exactly the same look & feel as Google results, not very innovative.

Let’s compare: