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.

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!

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.

The recent editions has added features which previously were only found in commercial offerings, such as

• Automatic replication for large installations with distributed search
• Java-API (SolrJ)
• Conversion of Office-documents
• Full faceted search
• Advanced tokenization, highlighting and stemming

Apache Solr is being adopted more widely, and some companies even start replacing their expensive commercial engine with Solr with good results. In that way they can spend less on licenses and more on content quality and tuning.

Feeling ready to try Solr? Contact us for a talk, or download it yourself and try the tutorial. Here’s a short video introducing you to the basics:

I will soon write about how to obtain professional support for Apache Solr.

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.

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