It’s that time of year, so I thought I would take a look back at the year that was for the Lucene Ecosystem and maybe look ahead just a little bit too.

First and foremost, it should be obvious to even the most casual observer that the Apache Lucene communities are thriving.  Not only is it a great time to be involved in open source, it’s a great time to be involved in Lucene.  Both as a…

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Word out today that Google is eyeing buying its way into another search market it does not yet own — with the possible purchase of Yelp.com. The community-driven local search and recommendation site has built a $30 million dollar business matching restaurants and other local businesses with user reviews, using another community driven strategy: Lucene open source search technology.

Yelp saw the opportunity to tap the growth of available data by doing a better job of getting their users…

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Learn Solr from the Solr experts!
New Solr training dates have just been announced:

Solr Essentials – online training lead by a live instructor
Thursday, Feb 25th, 2010
Click here to register

Introduction to Solr - 3-day class in San Mateo, CA
Feb 15-17, 2010
Click here to register

If you can’t make these dates, click on the registration links above for additional available dates.

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Last night I had the honor and pleasure of presenting at one of my favorite venues, thanks to its proximity to home and the many friends and colleagues I have in the area.  The crowd was amazing!   100+, standing room only – wow, does NOVAJUG know how to meet.

And we had a special guest speaker after my talk, more on that below.

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I recently had the pleasure of speaking to Gary McFadden, who writes for Wikibon, an interesting market analyst premised on the dual notions of open source meritocracy with openly modifiable “expert” opinions. I’d recommend his article on the future of enterprise search:

By 2012, unified search platforms that combine both enterprise and Internet search capabilities will be widely adopted by knowledge workers seeking flexibility to tune information access solutions for diverse workloads across a variety of content…

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Lucid Imagination and the Northern Virginia Java User’s Group (NOVAJUG) are sponsoring this month’s NOVA Apache Lucene/Solr meetup. Location: Reston, VA Time and Date: 16 December, 2009, at 6:30pm Eastern. Featured speaker: Erik Hatcher

Solr powers search for a broad range of enterprise applications and high profile websites. Erik will introduce Solr and show how to build a full featured application, and explore the plethora of ways to get data into Solr, including…

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The paint is barely dry on Apache Solr 1.4 and the community is already on the move for Solr 1.5 (which may actually be Solr 2.0, but for now let’s call it 1.5).

I’m particularly excited about a few things:

1. Massive scalability capabilities via distributed search, indexing and shard management – Up until now, Solr scales pretty well on the search side (I’ve seen billion+ document instances and we’ve benchmarked it at that level too), but the work…

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WEBINAR: Take Control of Your Search Destiny:
Migrating to Apache Solr/Lucene Open Source Search

Hosted by KMWorld and featuring speakers from The Motley Fool

Click here to view the webinar or download the slides

As today’s business landscape changes, more and more companies want control over their search to take on the rapid acceleration in scale and diversity of their data and documents. But legacy commercial search applications can add hidden costs and constraints, and make it difficult to innovate…

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Ashlee Vance’s insightful piece in Monday’s NYTimes on the implications of the wrangling between the EU and Larry Ellison over Sun and MySQL lit up a lot of conversation in open source circles. And with Open Source reaching something like a ten-year mark since Redhat and Linux broke forth in a big way, it’s a good time to ask the question? Is Open Source a business model, and if so, can it succeed? I think…

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Join us for a free technical webinar
Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009
11:00 AM PST / 2:00 PM EST

Download the slides and view the archived webcast here

The open source Apache Solr open source search engine provides powerful, versatile search application development technology so you to take full control of your search needs. Solr’s rich interfaces and convenient server packaging of the underlying Apache Lucene search libraries into web service interfaces, and near limitless customizability let…

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