August 27, 2010
Lately, Brazil has been getting a lot of attention (host to the next World Cup in 2014 and site of the first Olympics to be held in South America in 2016), but it also has gotten attention for its embrace of open source technologies. It was my pleasure to speak at an event organized for business executives by our partner in Brazil, Primeware. The topic?—Open source enterprise search software, of course.
I talk about my…
July 15, 2010
As some of you may know, I blog regularly on Network World’s Open Source Subnet. Watch weekly for more of my musings on trends, news and any number of topics that catch my interest. In my most recent post, I ask readers for their take on the legal maze associated with open source. In my opinion, Apache is the most liberal open source package today, the one most true to form. Everybody can use it,…
April 22, 2010
After reviewing a lot of great talk proposals, we’ve announced the agenda for Apache Lucene Eurocon: Apache Lucene EuroCon – Europe’s Premier Lucene and Solr Search User Conference.
One of the things I really like about this agenda is it is a great mix of basics, use cases from all over the search map (CMS, news, social media, advertising), business decisions (see last list and next list) and advanced topics (NLP, collab filtering, machine…
February 17, 2010
I’ve gotten quite a few inquiries during the last month from people interested in the sources of LucidWorks Certified Distribution for Solr. I’m happy to see our Certified Distribution generating so much interest in the community; more than a few large companies are developing with it and using the certified distribution in order as the foundation of their search applications. I’d love to see even more companies adopting the certified distribution for their needs.
The…
January 14, 2010
A recent Slashdot poster asked for Solr-powered “Attractive Open Source Search Interfaces”. First, for some inspiration on what you might want to have in a search user interface, check out Peter Morville’s excellent set of screenshot examples. One of my favorite examples is, of course, from the library space. Morville showcases the NCSU library system site on one of his sets:
Several Solr-powered open source faceted navigation search systems for…
January 11, 2010
Solr 1.4 Enterprise Search Server, by David Smiley and Eric Pugh is a must-have for all new-comers to Solr. It provides a comprehensive overview of the features needed for practically every project, from indexing common data sources to searching with faceting, highlighting, spell checking and then covers deployment and performance topics. One tough issue this book, and practically all books based on open source software, faced was coinciding publication with the release…
January 8, 2010
I’ve long had a passion for improving the findability within libraries. The richness of the cultural artifacts that one can find with a bit of foraging astonishes the imagination. I had the pleasure of working with the Applied Research in Patacriticism group at the University of Virginia. While building the first version of Collex (collect/exhibit) for NINES I was approached by Bess Sadler asking about the viability of using Solr for…
December 24, 2009
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. …
December 12, 2009
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:
…
December 8, 2009
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,…