Enterprise Search Sourcebook 2008

software is the particular requirements of a given open source license. The Apache Software License, for example, is fairly liberal. Other licenses, like the BSD license or the GNU Public License (GPL), have some pretty significant strings attached, and they may have licensing fees that rival those of commercial licenses for commercial use. Solr and Lucene are under the Apache Software License version 2.0. At this point, my utter lack of lawyerly credentials compels me to point you to the Apache website for the actual text of the license (www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0). Any software that you consider using for any significant project should be vetted through your legal and purchasing departments. So be careful. Don’t assume that open source necessarily means free. That being said, there is something magical about the open source community getting together to build cool software without the benefit of endless marketing meetings and concerns about the bottom line. Some of the most talented software engineers in the world are involved in writing open source software. The Apache Software Foundation, which hosts Lucene, Solr, and Nutch, is particularly well-regarded in the open source community. The Apache web server is still the dominant server on the web, with more than 50% market share as of September 2007. It has held that spot since 1996. Who to Sue Say you are a giant company. You spend hundreds of thousands of clams on a proprietary search solution from a commercial vendor. You have all kinds of contracts, and your lawyers have met with their lawyers. Maybe your CTO has been golfing with their sales manager. Unfortunately, the software doesn’t quite live up to your expectations. They told you it was easy to set up. It isn’t. It crashes all the time, and you can’t for the life of you sort out why a search for “toilet plunger” returns your corporate homepage. You really need to talk to the surly guy with the neck beard who wrote the software. Sadly, a phalanx of scriptreading gatekeepers keeps asking you for your “site ID” and telling you to try a reinstall and reboot. It probably won’t get to the point of a lawsuit—after all, your CEO hasn’t yet berated their CEO on the phone— but at least you have the threat of legal action and revenue reversals to get the vendor’s attention. Not so with open source software. There is nobody to sue. There are no invoices to withhold. Which is all a big risk. Luckily, there are some features of open source software that mitigate this risk. It is “open source” after all. You have complete access to the source code. If the software doesn’t do what you want it to do, you can fix it. More precisely, you can hire someone to fix it. Since it is open source, there are probably quite a few fervent hackers who would be happy to add a patch or fix that crash bug for a reasonable and customary fee. Try wresting a peek at the source code to a commercial search application to figure out exactly why toilet plunger accuracy is so elusive. I’ll wait So what about support? For active open source projects like Lucene, Solr, and Nutch, there are very active support mailing lists and fora. Often, you can post a question in the morning and one or more of the committers or contributors to the project will reply by the afternoon, if not immediately. This level of support is superior to what you often get with an annual maintenance contract for commercial software, and it is provided free of charge by people who love and develop the software. For example, I subscribe to the Solr-dev mailing list. Every day I get dozens of questions and answers posted to my inbox. There are 1,717 unread messages in my “Solr Subscription” email folder. Yet even if (or possibly because) I’m not the one responding, very few of the questions go unanswered. The list archive on the Nabble forum website (www.nabble.com) has thousands more questions. The community is helpful, friendly, and responsive to politely worded requests for answers. Since ostensibly nobody is being paid to monitor and respond to questions, it is amazing that this process works at all. Elixir or Poison? Presenting two alternatives as the only possible options to describe Solr, when in reality there exists one or more other options, is what we in the logical fallacy business call a false dichotomy. Solr is neither an elixir nor a poison. It’s more like a hamburger: satisfying and nutritious, and you can live on nothing but hamburgers (for a while at least). But in order to get full value from hamburgers, you really need some broccoli; maybe a bun; some lettuce, tomatoes, onions; and a tall glass of unsweetened iced tea. Surprisingly, you don’t need fries at all. Of course not everybody loves hamburgers. If you are a vegan for example, you probably want nothing to do with a hamburger, no matter how juicy and delicious it may be. (Sadly, this exquisite analogy breaks down rather quickly.) For example, hamburgers really taste best in summer, right off the grill—whereas, despite its sunny name, Solr is a computer program. Forget I ever mentioned it. How about this: Solr is like a giant badger Oh, never mind. Flawed analogies aside, you have many options when choosing an enterprise search platform. Open source software can provide a compelling choice for many organizations, maybe even yours. GEORGE EVERITT (geveritt@appliedrelevance.com) is currently president of Applied Relevance LLC, an enterprise search consulting firm. He began his career in the information management sector as a senior consultant for Verity, Inc. and later with Autonomy, Inc. During his time with these firms, his clients included well-known organizations in many disparate verticals including pharmaceutical, law enforcement, government and defense, publishing, and financial services. Everitt lives in the Tampa Bay, Fla., area with his wife and two sons. WWW.ENTERPRISESEARCHCENTER.COM 35 http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0 http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0 http://www.nabble.com http://WWW.ENTERPRISESEARCHCENTER.COM

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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