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.

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

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.

Let’s compare:

From a decision engine I’d expect to get an overview of possible travel options, such as Air, Bus, Train. This however is just the normal bla-bla. Let’s try the same on Google:

At least the top two results on Google are about flights between the two cities, which is better.

Let’s try to get decision help in purchasing an iPhone. From some more searching, it seems as if it is unfair to do the comparison on the Norwegian version of Bing, as it does not contain ads or related searches, so let’s go for the English. Search is “buy iPhone”:

That’s a bit better:

Here, both Bing and Google at least show both relevant ads and iPhone links. But decision engine????

The shopping support does not show up until I try to find it, searching for “casio exilim” – the first link is “Shop for Casio Exilim”, and clicking that takes me to a nice result set with photos of the models, reviews and price. Not very impressive, as Google has had this with Froogle for many years.

Bing seems not to be the revolusion Microsoft promised, so time will show if it becomes a hit or not.

Gavekort

Cominvent runs the gift card portal www.gavekort.no, which was first launched in 2006. Before christmas 2008, the site was completely re-written, with a new portal framework, new design and much more content.

Gavekort.no is Norway’s largest collection of gift cards. From one single site you can search or navigate to find the gift card that suits you (or the lucky receiver) the best. The users love it. And the shops love it as well, as it gives them better exposure of their gift cards and thus more sales.

Both listing in the portal and use of it is free of charge, says Jan Høydahl. We believe this is the modern way of building up a large popular service with many satisfied users – giving something away for free. And the core of the service will always be free, even if we in the future will monetize on other aspects.

Visit the site and see for youself!