Some of you read my previous posts The state of open source search. I will in this post go through the process of downloading, installing, configuring and using Apache SOLR to index some sample XML data and search it. This is the first post in a series, where each new post will explore some new
Open Source Software (OSS) and free software has been an alternative to commercial, licensed software for decades. Most known and successful are perhaps projects like GNU/Linux (licensed under the GNU General Public License, GPL), OpenOffice.org, Apache web server and MySQL. They have all managed to produce excellent, high-quality, stable software with an impressive wide-spread use. Other well known projects that are also Open Source are Java programming language, Norwegian TrollTech’s (now Nokia) Qt, Mozilla Firefox, Thunderbird, eZ Publish, and the list goes on.
For Search, there are a few players picking up speed that you should be aware of:
OpenPipeline – an open-source document processing pipeline
Most commercial search engines include a more or less advanced document processing pipeline for transforming raw input into something that can be indexed. The process involves normalization, entity extraction, linguistic processing, annotation, data cleansing etc. When it comes to Open Source search engines, they start getting pretty good at the core of indexing and search,
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