Some people are perhaps more comfortable learning through a book than through Wiki pages and README files.

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

I was in SF, California last week to dig deeper into Solr and to meet with its core developers (now working for Lucid Imagination). It was a great week with many new connections and new insight.

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.

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Microsoft’s new search engine “Bing” which replaces Live Search, promises to be a decision engine rather than a search engine. Cominvent has tried it.
The front page of “Bing” is nice looking. I’m in Alexandria, and want to decide how to get from Alexandria to Hurghada, so I type “how to get from alexandria to hurghada”. The result set is a non-impressive boring listing of results, with exactly the same look & feel as Google results, not very innovative.

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As a search specialist I appreciate proper search features, also on the smartphone. For those of us remembering the PalmPilot back in 2000, it had a wonderful global search option, bringing up results from all applications in one screen. Perfect! And now we get this on the iPhone. In iPhone OS 3.0 coming this summer, Spotlight search will be standard. This is implemented as a new search screen to the left of the main screen, which brings up results from all applications in the same result set.
This is just perfect for quickly finding that contact you know lives in Sweden, or that SMS (or was it an email?) you wrote last week. I have always missed the PalmPilot’s powerful search, and now I can’t wait to see it coming to my phone – only 9 years later

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!