> He said some other things about a huge petabyte hosted search collection > they have used by banks..
In context of your discussion this reference sounds really, really funny... :) -Alexander On Wed, Sep 22, 2010 at 1:17 PM, Grant Ingersoll <gsing...@apache.org> wrote: > > On Sep 22, 2010, at 2:04 PM, Smiley, David W. wrote: > >> (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). > > Too funny. Hadn't heard that one before. Presumably meaning you have to > care and feed it, despite the fact that you really do love it and it is cute > as hell? The care and feeding is true of the commercial ones, too, > especially in terms of $$$$ for supporting features you never use, but love > (as in we love using this tool) is usually not a word I hear associated in > those respects too often, but of course that is likely self selecting. > >> 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. > > Having replaced all the above on a number of occasions w/ Solr at both a > significant cost savings on licensing, dev time, and hardware, I would agree > that claim is quite ridiculous. Besides, in my experience, the scale claim > is silly. Everyone (customers) says they need scale, but few of them really > know what scale is, so it is all relative. For some, scale is 1M docs, for > others it's 1B+ docs; for others it's 100K queries per day, for others it's > 100M per day. (BTW, I've seen Lucene/Solr do both, just fine. Not that it > is a free lunch, but neither are the other ones despite what they say.) > >> >> 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. > > > I love it. I have had the same experience where people think it's broken b/c > it's so fast. Large vendor named above took 24 hours to index 4M records > (they weren't even doing anything fancy on the indexing side) and search was > slow too. Solr took about 40 minutes to index all the content and search was > blazing. Same content, faster indexing, better search results, a lot less > time. > > At any rate, enough of tooting our own horn. Thanks for sharing! > > -Grant > > > -------------------------- > Grant Ingersoll > http://www.lucidimagination.com/ > >
