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.

The seminar is at Radisson Blu Plaza Hotel in Oslo, between 8-10am wednesday May 5th.

Join us for a discussion around these topics:

• What is open source and how does it affect search technology?
• How does Solr/Lucene really work?
• What alternatives are there within Solr/Lucene?

We’ll also present a few customer cases to highlight successful implementation of open source enterprise search.

See the attached invitation (PDF, Norwegian) for more.

Sign up now

Perhaps it’s time for a faster, bigger, more feature rich, more extensible or more affordable search engine? A migration requires good and structured planning and deep knowledge of the existing solution as well as the target technology.

With almost 10 years of full-time, hands-on consulting experience within all kinds of enterprise search solutions, Jan Høydahl at Cominvent has what it takes. See our new migration page for more info.

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

Apache Solr 1.4 has been released and is now available for
public download! http://www.apache.org/dyn/closer.cgi/lucene/solr/

Solr is the popular, blazing fast open source enterprise search
platform from the Apache Lucene project. Its major features include
powerful full-text search, hit highlighting, faceted search,
dynamic clustering, database integration, and rich document (e.g.,
Word, PDF) handling. Solr is highly scalable, providing distributed
search and index replication, and it powers the search and
navigation features of many of the world’s largest internet sites.

Solr is written in Java and runs as a standalone full-text search
server within a servlet container such as Tomcat. Solr uses the
Lucene Java search library at its core for full-text indexing and
search, and has REST-like HTTP/XML and JSON APIs that make it easy
to use from virtually any programming language. Solr’s powerful
external configuration allows it to be tailored to almost any type
of application without Java coding, and it has an extensive plugin
architecture when more advanced customization is required.

New Solr 1.4 features include
- Major performance enhancements in indexing, searching, and
  faceting
- Revamped all-Java index replication that’s simple to configure
  and can replicate config files
- Greatly improved database integration via the DataImportHandler
- Rich document processing (Word, PDF, HTML) via Apache Tika
- Dynamic search results clustering via Carrot2
- Multi-select faceting (support for multiple items in a single
  category to be selected)
- Many powerful query enhancements, including ranges over arbitrary
  functions, and nested queries of different syntaxes
- Many other plugins including Terms for auto-suggest, Statistics,
  TermVectors, Deduplication

Getting Started
---------------
New to Solr? Follow the steps below to get up and running ASAP.

1. Download Solr at http://www.apache.org/dyn/closer.cgi/lucene/solr/
2. Check out the tutorial at http://lucene.apache.org/solr/tutorial.html
3. Read the Solr wiki (http://wiki.apache.org/solr) to learn more
4. Join the community by subscribing to solr-user@lucene.apache.org
5. Give Back (Optional, but encouraged!)
   See http://wiki.apache.org/solr/HowToContribute

For more information on Apache Solr, see http://lucene.apache.org/solr

Release-declaration sourced from Grant Ingersoll’s blog.

Cominvent delivers training on Solr 1.4.

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

That would come as no surpise to us who have followed Lucene for some time. And perhaps for intelligence in particular, they do not want to be too heavily dependent upon closed source code. In their press release, In-Q-Tel they say that they want to secure advanced access to Lucene/Solr technology, and state that Lucene/Solr is one of the fastest growing search solutions over the last three years.

This is good news for all users of Lucene/Solr search, also in Norway where Cominvent is Lucid Imagination’s partner. It gives even more credibility to open source search, and makes this platform grow even faster. Time for Norwegian intelligence to follow?