Enterprise Search Sourcebook 2008

OPEN SOURCE SEARCH: elixir or POISON? BY GEORGE EVERITT W hen I was a child in the ’70s I was promised three things: an empathetic computer with a conversational voice bearing a Canadian accent, a ride on a Pan American World Airways space shuttle, and a good selection of open source enterprise search software. These things were to be ubiquitous by 2001. And no, I was never promised a flying car. Heck, that’s just silly. Armed with expectation, I invested in a computer science degree and then waited for the juggernaut of open source enterprise search (OSES to coin an acronym) software to sweep me into a world of linguistic bliss. And I waited. And waited. Waiting is not as lucrative as one might hope, so after a while I got a job with a commercial enterprise search vendor. I slogged thousands of miles helping hard-working North Americans find stuff on their internal networks. I tell myself that this was rewarding, which dampens the cognitive dissonance that the past 10 years of my life has been a complete failure of potential. If only I had chosen a career in database, operating system, or even front-office applications, I would be luxuriating in the likes of Linux, MySQL, Tomcat, and even OpenOffice. It seems like the great open source solutions to common computing problems have been around for a long time. Take databases: Relational database management systems have been in common use since the 1980s, and we have quite a few open source options like MySQL, which has been around for at least a decade. Tomcat is equally wellregarded as a web application server, and OpenOffice is making a concerted effort to unseat the seemingly unmovable Microsoft Office as king of the spreadsheets. Solr Nrgy A few years ago, Doug Cutting gave the open source world a wonderful gift. Not to get all gushy about it, but it really is a nice piece of software: Lucene is an open source search library that is fast, extensible, scalable, and easy to embed. Originally written in Java, there are ports available for all of the major programming languages. It is highly thought of and embedded in dozens of commercial and open source web and desktop applications. But before you get too excited, there are a few things you should know. Lucene does some things very well, but even indexing an HTML document from a file system requires you to write code. If you’re building the next killer blog software 30 ENTERPRISE SEARCH SOURCEBOOK 2008

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Enterprise Search Sourcebook 2008

Enterprise Search Sourcebook 2008 Contents Editor’s Note Publisher’s Note Findings and Figures Why Enterprise Search Will Never Be Google-y Searching for Search Usability Your Users Are Talking to You What’s Your Search Story? Search Is Dead—Now What? Delivering on the Promise of Enterprise Search Taming Multiple Search Engines in Your Organization Enterprise Search: Trends for 2008 Enterprise Search Seen From the Inside Open Source Search: Elixir or Poison? Avoiding the Big Mistakes in Search Semantic Search Takes Root in the Enterprise E-Discovery Essentials: The Rules You Need to Know SharePoint Search: An Enterprise Contender? Integrating Security Into Your Enterprise Search Infrastructure Engineering a Better Search Infrastructure Letting End Users Ask the Questions, Stat! The Power of Knowledge Legal Research Using Enterprise Search: A Developer’s View From Treading Water to Full Steam Ahead Pulling Out All the Stops With Midas A Natural Search Solution An Incremental Approach to Improving Enterprise Search The Enterprise Search Sourcebook Showcase Directory Index to Advertisers and Companies Mentioned

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