(I don't twitter or blog so I thought I'd send this message here) Today at work (at MITRE outside DC) there was (is) a day of technical presentations about topics related to information dissemination and discovery (broad squishy words there, but mostly covered "search") at which I spoke about the value of faceting, and gave a quick Solr pitch. There was an hour vendor panel in which a representative from Autonomy, Microsoft (i.e. FAST), Google, Vivisimo, and Endeca had the opportunity to espouse the virtues of their product, and fit in an occasional jab at their competitors next to them. In the absence of a suitable representative for Solr (e.g. Lucid) I pointed out how open-source Solr has "democratized" (i.e. made free) search and faceting when it used to require paying lots of money. And I asked them how their products have reacted to this new reality. Autonomy acknowledged they used to make millions on simple engagements in the distant past but that isn't the case these days. He said some other things about a huge petabyte hosted search collection they have used by banks... I forget what else he said. I forgot what Google said. Vivisimo quoted Steve Ballmer, saying "open source is as free as a free puppy" (not a bad point IMO). Endeca claimed to be happy Solr exists because it raises the awareness of faceted search, but then claimed it would not scale and they should then upgrade to Endeca. (!) I found that claim ridiculous, of course.
Speaking of performance, on a large scale search project where we're using Solr in place of a MarkLogic prototype (because ML is so friggin expensive, for one reason), the search results were so fast (~150ms) vs. the ML's results of 2-3 seconds, that the UI engineers building the interface on top of the XML output thought Solr was broken because it was so fast. The quote was "It's so fast, it's broken". In other words, they were used to 2-3 second response times and so if the results came back as fast as what Solr has been doing, then surely there's a bug. There's no bug. :) Admittedly, I think it was a bit of an apples and oranges comparison but I love that quote nonetheless. ~ David Smiley Author: https://www.packtpub.com/solr-1-4-enterprise-search-server/book
