After a week off to enjoy time with my family, I thought I would kick off the last week of 2010 with a look back at the year as it relates to the Apache Lucene ecosystem.  For anyone who follows the amalgamation of projects that I like to call the Lucene Ecosystem (the Apache projects: Lucene, Solr, Nutch, Mahout, Tika, PyLucene, Lucy, Lucene.NET, Droids, ManifoldCF — Lucene Connector Framework, OpenNLP and UIMA) you know it …

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Last week at Lucene Revolution we announced LucidWorks Enterprise. LucidWorks Enterprise is a commercially supported search platform that builds on the power of Apache Lucene and Solr to deliver a flexible and scalable search platform.

Gee.  That almost sounds like a marketing guy wrote it.  Let me try again: LucidWorks Enterprise is software that let’s you easily build great search applications.  You can install it, index some content, and search that content with just a …

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Do you remember this scenario from days of yore?

• Company A buys a software license from Company B, a startup.
• Company A crosses its fingers that Company B doesn’t go bankrupt and disappear, along with the source code for Company A’s mission-critical software.
• Company B goes kaput.
• Company A is left with some machine-readable binary code that it is powerless to develop or use.

Source code escrow has changed the outcome of this sticky situation …

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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 …

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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 …

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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),

…

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