FAST to abandon Linux and Unix

In a recent blog post by CTO Bjørn Olstad, referenced by CNet, Beyond Search and Norwegian digi.no today, FAST announces that ESP 5.3 is the last version of their Enterprise Search Platform to run on Linux or Unix.

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.

Solr does GEO search

gisApache Solr is a very capable enterprise search platform, doing most things you would expect from such a solution. But what about GEO sensitive applications like Yellow-pages, maps search, sort by distance to X etc? The big commercial systems such as FAST, Autonomy and Endecca, have it but Apache Lucene/Solr does not seem to support GEO search, or what?

Apache Solr 1.4 finally released

apache_solr_logoFinally, after long delays, Apache Solr version 1.4 is released. The long delay was mainly due to very strict quality standards, which made it necessary to wait until some serious known bugs were dealt with. Also read my previous article on what’s new in this version. Here is the official release statement:

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

Solr being used by Google’s allforgood.org

Google runs a web page called AllForGood which helps people find opportunities to volunteer in various organizations in their neighbourhood. In the beginning, the search in the site was updated from Google’s crawlers crawling several volunteer webpages. However, when designing a tighter integrated, more real-time search, they turned to Apache Solr. On their blog they