LucidWorks | Features and Benefits
The experts at Lucid Imagination helped create Apache Solr, and we've helped solve some of the world's most complex search problems.
LucidWorks is the search platform that accelerates and simplifies development of highly accurate, scalable and cost-effective search applications. It delivers full open source Apache Lucene/Solr community innovation in a convenient, commercial-grade package, with global 24x7 support from the world's leading experts in open source search.
Create multiple collections, manage them independently, and monitor query and indexing activity of each one. Connect to multiple Big Data, web, SharePoint, enterprise and external data sources. Configure index and query settings, fields, stop words, synonyms for each collection. Logs are indexed and searchable for easier troubleshooting of errors and warnings. All that makes it easier for you to take on the art and science of search.
Key features and benefits of LucidWorks search platform
Streamlined Search Configuration, Optimization and Operations
You don't need to be a Lucene/Solr expert before you can use LucidWorks. By bringing together controls and optimization parameters in an intuitive, integrated, well-organized user interface, it makes Lucene/Solr power and innovation easier to consume, both by you and your application.
- Highlights key performance parameters and user patterns using intuitive console and controls
- Complete Solr search query, data, and index settings in a controlled environment for planful, easy-to-manage changes
- Combination of GUI access and well-abstracted scripting APIs streamlines change management both for the content/data being searched and the needs of users searching it
- Usability fit for a range of skill levels, with smart defaults, to make ongoing control of search accessible to a range of skill levels from novice developers to experts.
Enterprise-grade, business critical operations- and infrastructure-ready
Delivering business value with Lucene/Solr open source search technology means your search application must thrive within a well-defined, well-managed operational envelope. LucidWorks provides the solid foundation of integration, with monitoring interfaces and systems management instrumentation to give you the peace of mind you need in deploying open source technology throughout the application lifecycle.
- Highly extensible ReST API transparently exposes control of search configuration for integration with broader application, data and operational infrastructure; simplifies transparent, administration and consumption of search as a service or for value-added search-enabled applications
- Analyze historical performance trends for capacity planning and system resource sizing to prevent load-spike surprises watch and correct search application performance based on clear data from monitoring tools
- Business rules for the integration of business processes and an improved search experience including integration with Drools, the leading open source BRMS.
- Migrate to successive LucidWorks/Solr releases without requiring intimate knowledge of low-level Solr/Lucene configuration details
- Index, search and facet Solr server logs, to directly expose and analyze historical search data, and identify critical patterns of user and system behavior
- Packaged for easy installation, deployment and replication, to readily expand search capacity as demand increases
- With convenient, well-instrumented interfaces to popular application monitoring and management tools, enables live and historic tracking of performance statistics to facilitate more effective debugging and decision making
Broad-based content acquisition, with versatile access and data security
LucidWorks indexes, searches and retrieves across a wide array of repositories and file types so you get the right results across the full breadth of sources for faster, hassle free connections that let you crawl the full breadth of data
- Built-in support for Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS), Amazon EC2 S3 cloud storage, plus the first fully integrated open source connector for searching Microsoft SharePoint CMS.
- Pre-configured acquisition for RDBMS, file systems, web sites, and more and file types (Microsoft Office, PDF, native XML format documents, among others)
- Customizable for your own unique set of repositories and source-data-stores with a flexible connector framework that streamlines and organizes key access parameters to index and query any given content repository or data source.
- Fine-grained, iterative control of data acquisition timing and sources, both for development and production search applications, simplifying integrated crawling configuration and management
- Raw and parsed content stored in well-defined locations can be processed iteratively; for example, data can be retrieved once and indexed multiple times to support different search scenarios
- Avoid lock-in to a particular vendor, platform or software environment, so you can adapt as your business changes, and draw upon a broader range of developer skillsets
Resilient, flexible security model that's easy to configure and control
Different documents and repositories require differential control of user and search access to documents of varying sensitivities. LucidWorks uses a well-organized set of interfaces in its Admin UI to let you set up and control security and access clearly and easily.
- Integrates with existing security infrastructure, applying your policies to user roles and document permissions
- Acquires both secured and unsecured content within a single crawl, simplify indexing across multiple sources
- Commercial grade https encryption can protect traffic within the search environment
- Built-in fully configurable role definition and control, to create document level security and admin function security
Advanced search experience easily integrated into your application and infrastructure
With users expectations well-schooled by the consumer search experience, your search application has to deliver an impeccable experience. With LucidWorks, you can combining the simplicity users expect with the precision and recall that they need.
- Handles a broader range of query inputs, helping ensure that users retrieve better, more complete results more quickly – and reduces the likelihood that users will see an error message
- Click-scoring framework can automatically leverage ongoing user interaction with the search system, prioritizing results that users have already selected for subsequent searches of the same query
- When new results are available, helps automatically alert users of the availability of the information without their having to return and search again and again
- Built-in autocomplete suggests completed search terms as queries are typed in, so users can quickly complete input or choose from frequently occurring query terms
Lucene/Solr 4 for the latest in open source power and innovation
Lucene/Solr continuously delivers powerful new benefits, yet it can be can be costly and time-consuming to constantly track exactly what the community is releasing and when. Do you see new stuff in trunk you think can work for you, but lack the time or inclination to check it out? At Lucid Imagination, we not only employ many of the very people writing new Lucene/Solr software, we curate the very best software from the open source process into LucidWorks, so you don't have to do all of the assembly and testing.
- Near real time search so new data can be found within seconds of publication, for twitter-like speeds in big fast-changing content streams with real time writes and reads
- Scales at lower cost to accommodate continuous growth in data scope and diversity various topologies without compromising scale, performance or accuracy.
- Uses new, highly-efficient comparator within any given editorial distance can identify matches across similar, but not identical terms and strings with orders of magnitude greater speed and efficiency, for more efficient spellchecking, fuzzy matching, and more
- Contains full Solr/Lucene, exposing all interfaces, with the full breadth of Solr's capabilities – faceted navigation, auto-suggest, spellcheck; fine-grained results and relevancy tuning; and full web-based encapsulation of the Lucene search libraries in consolidated, transparent configuration files – that have made Solr open source technology a mainstay of leading edge search solutions.
- Provides fault tolerance and high availability through replication and automatic failover. Includes both read and write side fault tolerance.
- Includes durable writes with optimistic locking.
- Provides centralized configuration facilities that can maintain multiple configurations. Includes an overseer for cluster coordination.