I’ve been actively participating in the Lucene/Solr community for a few years: Answering questions on the solr-user and dev mailing lists, reporting bugs, uploading patches etc. This week I was invited by the PMC as a committer on the Lucene/Solr project, joining the twenty-something other existing committers. I’m honored of this invite, which also shows that the ASF works as a true meritocracy, those who show persistent contribution over time will be given more responsibility.

Looking forward to my first commit and many more to come, improving an already great code base. If you have a JIRA issue you’d like me to work on, please suggest one in the comment field!

The drawing is created using Google draw, and the original is shared on Google Docs. We have licensed the diagram under the very permissive CC-by license which lets you use, modify and re-distribute the diagram, even commercially, as long as you give attribution with link to Cominvent. To get started, simply:

1. Click the thumbnail (link) which will open Google Docs (log in to your Google Account)
2. To make your own copy, select “Make a copy…” in the File menu
3. Make sure to keep the CC license logo and a link to www.cominvent.com
4. Please share your edits with the community if you think it is useful to others

Comments are welcome!

Mike also introduces a cool new merge policy called TieredMergePolicy (LUCENE-854) which is much smarter and slightly more efficient than the default one. Hope this becomes the new default merge policy in Solr.

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.

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.

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

First 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.

In the upcoming version 1.4 of Solr, there are a lot of good stuff. Let me ierate some of them:

• Better built-in support for replication to multi node
• Improved performance of facets (navigators)
• Greatly improved performance of numeric sort and range queries
• A number of bug fixes
• Import of Word, Excel, PPT, PDF +++ formats through Tikka

This promises good for the enterprise use case, which both needs scalability and multiple document format support. The new index replication feature is implemented in Java and is socket based, promising to work on all platforms. The old implementation was script+rsync based and would only work on *NIX systems.

Also, being able to work with MS Office document formats is important. There might be commercial document conversion filters which support more formats and at a better quality, but having a free open alternative by default and an commercial upgrade path is all about choice and flexibility, isn’t it?

Cominvent AS, an independent search consulting company, is partnering with Lucid Imagination, offering professional support and training to the Norwegian market. We also offer consulting- and training services for FAST ESP.

So you are thinking of adopting open source search Solr or Lucene, but are reluctant because of the lack of support fom the open source world?

Or perhaps you are already using Apache Solr or Lucene in your organization, and would like to have an expert partner to support you with your current solution and to help you refine your search solution to better fit your needs and to give better results and performance.

We at Cominvent AS are experts in search and experts in Apache Solr and Lucene. But being a small organization we have not offered support contracts until now. We are now pleased to announce that Cominvent AS, through our partnership with Lucid Imagination, can offer you commercial support, consulting and training. Lucid Imagination was the first commercial entity to offer professional paid support for the Apache Lucene and Solr products, and some of the most skilled coders and engineers are associated with them.

Please contact us for a talk about your needs.

For Search, there are a few players picking up speed that you should be aware of:

OSS players a threat?

You probably know the search library Lucene from Apache Foundation. It provides a low-level library for simple indexing needs in your application. Then you have Apache Nutch, which adds a crawler, document converters, search UI etc to Lucene to make it an intranet/internet search engine. A pretty new project is Apache Solr, which is focusing more on the enterprise search side, allowing large-scale search indexes and faceted search. See links at end of article for more examples.

Now, what about enterprise search? Will commercial players like Google, Fast Search & Transfer (now Microsoft), Autonomy, and IBM face any competition by the Open Source products? The short answer is no. Not for the top-end market where search really is your business.

However, the products mentioned above can prove to be very attractive alternatives for the lowe-end market, for companies that need a simple quick search feature for their application, or a site search for their web page(s), a simple product search for their product catalogue or similar. I believe that already now many of those needs can be fulfilled by Open Source engines, and in the future we’ll also see more companies dedicated to installing and supporting such installations, getting their revenues from consulting, not licenses.

Note that we have not mentioned Free “down-scaled” versions of commercial products, such as the IBM Omnifind Yahoo! edition. This could be an excellent alternative for some needs, but it is not open source, so it is not mentioned here.

So keep your eyes wide open! Ask us if you need advice on how to handle your search needs.

Links

• http://infoaccess.wiki.zoho.com/Enterprise-Search-Engine-Vendors-in-2007.html (Impressive one-page overview of Enterprise Search players including OSS)
• http://lucene.apache.org/nutch/ (Apache Nutch)
• http://lucene.apache.org/solr/ (Apache Solr)
• http://www.opensourcesearch.org/ (Another list of OSS search)
• http://omnifind.ibm.yahoo.net/ IBM Omnifind Yoahoo! edition