: > Have folks seen this? : Not until now.
Nor I. : The standards it uses are interesting, but I don't know enough about : them to know if the benefits outweigh the costs. In general, it seems like it's more targeted at really simple indexes. IN paticular, as a way to have a single server supporting many simple indexes all completely administrated via the web -- in much the same way a lot of blog software is targeted at being able to run many blogs, allowing users people to create blogs on the fly. >From what i can tell looking at the API, you can't define much of a schema -- just tell it which field is your default searchfield, and which fields to use for the id, title, and summary -- neccessary concepts for it to know about to support OpenSearch. : The most interesting thing is perhaps OpenSearch... it enables : syndication (wasn't an original goal of Solr, but it's tough to say : what others might be interested in.) I looked into OpenSearch back when A9 first announced it. It's basically just a spec for returning search data in either RSS or Atom formats -- using a custom namespace to add metadata like the totl number of records. The only part i thought was really intersting was the "OpenSearch Description" which is their XML files for publicizing/identifying/autodiscovering your OpenSearch service. In short: It seemed to me at the time, that if we ever wanted to power an opensearch on Sol(a)r it would be easy to do using the standard query handler and a server-side XSLT to generate the RSS output. There may be more features to OpenSearch now, or I may have missed some when i looked into it before, but I don't think supporting it "natively" would be hard if there was interest. : >From a developer with prior Lucene exposure, I think Solr should be : more intuitive and straightforward. agreed. : I'd like to hear if anyone else has perspectives on this... : What are the usecases where one would want to use the Lucene Web : Service API rather than something like Solr or Nutch? I imagine that if i'm an web hosting provider who wants to support easy to use webservices for my clients (like WordPress, and Twiki) without needing to manually setup a lot of stuff per customer -- running a single instance of lucene-ws that they can create indexes in self serve might be apealing. -Hoss
