You are free to re-use the product sheet in your commercial business, as it is licensed under Creative Commons BY-SA, meaning you can even change it as long as you leave the credit and link to Cominvent in place and also share your changes under the same license in the ODF source form.

Download the Solr 3.1 product sheet (PDF).

And here is the Solr 3.1 product sheet master (ODT).

NOTE: Solr 3.1 is not yet released

Jan will be speaking about “Key topics when migrating from FAST to Solr”, pitched towards a Solr audience. There will be a short overview of FAST ESP, and a walkthrough of the migration process including what pain-points you could expect and how to handle them.

As a part of that planning process, we have decided that in order to deliver more innovation per release in the future, the 2010 products will be the last to include a search core that runs on Linux and UNIX.

This should not be a shock to anyone, and I hinted to this danger in my blog post about the acquisition:

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…

I guessed back then that Linux support would continue for another five years, but it turned out to be less than two While it is an expected and understandable, I think we all hoped that the press release following the acquisition hinted for a new, more open policy from the software giant, but that turned out to be too optimistic. But existing customers are not left completely alone; Olstad continues:

We will support ESP 5.3—the cross-platform search core in the 2010 products—for 10 years as per our standard support policy (5 years mainstream support and 5 years extended support).  Non-Windows customers on ESP 5.3 can continue running their core on Linux and UNIX and add Windows-only innovations or cloud-based services by using a mixed-platform architecture.

Many search consultant with experience from FAST ESP have experienced that the product is more capable under Linux than under Windows when you start pushing the boundaries. ESP is also easier to manage on a Linux platform due to SSH and friends. But that is not the major selling point anyway.

What this will mean for the existing and potential future customers is hard to predict. Obviously some organizations, especially smaller ones, demand Linux only in their data centers – these will start looking for another vendor.  Some of the bigger companies already have mixed environments and will easily be able to migrate, and may be happy.

Last but not least, the hint of cloud-support from the blog post opens another opportunity for existing customers running on Linux: Outsource the whole search hosting to Microsoft and don’t worry about the servers or OS at all. This may be the best option for many? Expect to see more references to hosted search going forward!

The training material, developed by Lucid Imagination, is recently updated to cover Solr 1.4, plus some additional contrib features like Carot2 clustering. The handout comprises more than 400 slides, but fear not – there are plenty of labs and room for Q&A and discussions, which makes the pace comfortable.

Soon to come is an advanced training class covering more complex issues such as performance tuning, scaling, plugin development etc. Stay tuned!

Read more at www.solrtraining.com and also follow us on Twitter.

Wrong. Maybe you did not know it, but the official Solr 1.4 release can easily be extended with loads of so called “Patches”. A “patch” is normally referred to as something fixing a problem and is perhaps not a good name for extra functionality, but that’s the way it works in the Apache world.

Patch SOLR-773 adds local search to Solr, enabling stuff like

• Only consider results closer than 50km from me (filter)
• Sort the resturant hits by distance from my location
• Rank restaurant hits by user ratings, but boost those in walking distance a bit

To learn more, view a recording of Grant Ingersoll’s excellent webcast on TheServerSide, where he explains more and also talks to YP.com and a GIS company about their experiences with GEO search in Solr.

I could have compiled the source from scratch, but a quick search gave this page from Gdgt providing a VMWare image of a complete install of Chrome OS. So I created a new virtual machine in VMWare Fusion on my MacBook, selected “Other Linux 2.6.x kernel” as OS type and poited it to the .vmdk disk image. See Figure 1 for how that looks.

Figure 1: VMWare Fusion with Chrome OS VM

After powering on the VM, it virtually took only 8 seconds for it to boot into the login screen. Here you fill in a valid Google login, e.g. a GMail address:

Then wait another 9 seconds for the Chrome browser to show up, already logged in to your GMail account. Nice. Everything in Chrome OS are web apps, and the Chrome browser shows App tabs differently than normal web page tabs. This is a nice and clean idea. Signing in to an OS with a web-based user name and password feels strange, but hey, it just works! And if you’re without internet connection, you can still sign in with an account that you’ve used before!

From here, browsing works like normal. You can create tabs, windows, switch between windows with Alt-TAB etc. In the upper righthand corner are some icons which provides you with some menus for battery status, WiFi and network connection and a general menu with access to options etc.

I was unable to test WiFi since my VMWare only provides ethernet to the local OS. I also tried to start the leftmost tab which is supposed to be a quick-launch for Web Apps, but it requires a <user>@google.com account which I don’t have, so I don’t know how to do that:

Glitches

This being an early pre-release of the OS one year before the launch of the first public version, no wonder there are some way to go still. Here are some of the minor issues I found

1. Not possible to change locale in login screen. U.S. keyboard layout is default., which means Norwegians need to search for the @ key and others.
2. Loggin in to a “Google Apps for Domains” account, auto-login to mail and calendar gets lost.
3. The quick-launch tab to the left does not let me login with a GMail account…
4. The whole thing just freezes sometimes Could be due to VMWare?

Read more

Here are a few articles I found useful

• GDGT: Download Google Chrome OS
• Live Blog: The Google Chrome OS Press Event
• PCWorld: Google Chrome OS: Visual Tour

So why leave Apple’s iTunes out in the cold? This is of course part of a battle of online digital music. Although some were guessing that Google were planning its own music service, partnering up with and helping the most innovative services out there may be a just as efficient move, if they manage to get people used to search for music in Google instead of through iTunes. Yes, some of these services let you purchase music as well as listen online.

I could not find any info on when this service is expected to Norway, if ever. I guess that would be with other partners since Rhapsody for one is U.S. only But we surely welcome all competition in this space, as the industry gets used to better models and cheaper music for us consumers.

After doing a normal image search, many of the results will let you click “find similar” (see illustration), bringing similar images. I tried it with the pyramids in Egypt which worked well. Searching for “laptop” brings up many different brands, and clicking similar on a MacBook really brings up other macbooks, on a Dell brings up other Dells (mostly) and on a Vaio brings up other Vaio’s.

I remember that FAST had similar capabilities even 5 years ago, which was piloted in a few showcases and select customer installations. For instance it was utilized for various Police departments to reveal child pornography on the internet. Now Google brings the same kind of technology to the masses, making search one step easier for all of us. Bravo!

However, when designing a tighter integrated, more real-time search, they turned to Apache Solr. On their blog they say

“…our search engine is now powered by SOLR, an incredible open source project that will allow us to provide higher quality and more up-to-date opportunities.”

What a super testimony for Solr’s strenths and maturity!

For years we’ve had books about Lucene, and now comes the first book about Apache Solr as well, titled Solr 1.4 Enterprise Search Server.

The book is written by David Smiley and Eric Pugh and is available for pre-order from Amazon. We’ll  post a review once we’ve read it. Until then, read more about the book from the authors at Amazon.

Update: Packt Publishing is sending me a copy of the book, and if you order it from this link I’ll even get a share