(...) any enterprise interested
in having a serious search solution (i.e. buy FAST, Autonomy or do
open source lucene) will want a custom solution (...) then
let an integrator/consultancy-firm/IT department to do the actual
implementation. So
a search distribution as pointed out is somewhat meaningless if
customization is important.
I'm talking about creating something that works much more easily out of
the box, and that can be customized as much as now - at the same time.
Of course serious search solutions would be completely customized,
always. And there are "out of the box" solutions (Google Appliance
etc.). But is there no market for a middle ground here?
Now there are organization that will want to have a black-box solution
i.e. Google-mini or Searchblox or the new IBM/Yahoo/Lucene search
solution (sorry I can't remember the name). These are pre-packaged
solution and low cost alternative, in some case free and offer no
customization and I am 100% sure those organization don not even want
customization.
Which ones are free? Are there any FLOSS alternatives to these black box
solutions? (IANAL, but the Apache license is more like LGPL than GPL,
right?)
So having the possibility to pick and choose and make a custom
solution from Lucene, Solr, Nutch, Hadoop is super perfect..You can do
more cool things then if all of these are bundles.
What I am really talking about, is this: There is a growing market for
simple search solutions that can work out of the box, and that can still
be customized. Something that:
- organizations can use on their network, out of the box
- on their intraweb, out of the box, just give credentials
- can handle user access out of the box (LDAP/NIS/AD)
- is FLOSS(!)
- can be fully customized, if desired
- modularized for even more customization if needed
Sure, one can argue like you have done so far by saying that they could
just compose their own solution completely... But then we are falling
outside the market again - which I hypotesize exist.
I am not looking to change Solr in that direction. But take a look at
Solr. Or Nutch. They are already built on Lucene and many other
projects. Why/not build something on top of this? Something more/else?
Thanks for all the feedback :) Please keep it coming.
