What are some Search Servers out there?

I'm looking to find alternatives to [Solr][1] from the Apache Software Foundation.

For those that don't know, Solr is an enterprise search server. A client application uses a web-services like interface to submit documents for indexing and also to perform search queries. Solr has other features built in like caching and replication. I believe it was originally started by CNet and then open-sourced.

I'm looking for other search servers out there that might be seen as the competition.

[1]:

[To see links please register here]

[IBM Omnifind Yahoo Edition][1] is an Enterprise search server which uses [Apache Lucene][2] for indexing. It is simple, easy to install and administer. It also has a built in Open Search API. It has multi-platform support and its Free!!

This product was launched by IBM to compete with [Google Mini][3] in the Enterprise Search market.


[1]:

[To see links please register here]

[2]:

[To see links please register here]

[3]: http://www.google.com/enterprise/mini/

[Fast ESP][1] which Microsoft bought in January 2008


[1]:

[To see links please register here]

+1 for Lucene and FAST. Lucene has also been ported to .NET if you're interested in extending it.

[To see links please register here]

In addition to the ones that people already mentioned, Microsoft has "[Microsoft Search Server][1]" and "[Microsoft Search Server Express][2]". The latter is free, the former supports a larger corpus.


[1]:

[To see links please register here]

[2]:

[To see links please register here]

Here are some more open source search engines

- [Sphinx][1]
- [Xapian][2]
- [Zend_Search_Lucene][3]

Here are some search related tools

- [Forage][4] The Forage PHP5 library is an easy to use interface to
multiple back end search libraries. It provides a common interface while
supporting unique features in each library by allowing back-ends to support
specific features or not.

- [Marjory][5] Marjory is a webservice for indexing and searching for
documents, utilizing a full-text search engine.


[1]:

[To see links please register here]

[2]:

[To see links please register here]

[3]:

[To see links please register here]

[4]:

[To see links please register here]

[5]:

[To see links please register here]

We are using Fast today. It's has many great features but we don't use them. It's expensive. We are in search for an alternate solution as well.

What about FACT-Finder? e.g.

[To see links please register here]

is using the search and navigation solution and more than 500 other european webshops. Highly error tolerant...

I've worked peripherally with Endeca, and it seems like a feature packed, fast engine.

They seem especially well suited towards eCommerce site driving, with special tools for customizing content for up-sells and cross-sells. I also think they are going to try and move into the BI space, so it should be an interesting combination of the two capabilities if they pull it off seamlessly.

I used to work at Endeca so take this for what it is. I won't comment on competitors, but I do really believe it's a significantly better product than anything else out there.

Solr provides basic faceted search, which is "good enough" for many applications. In a lot of ways, it's a low-end Endeca.

Some of the things Endeca would give you over Solr:

- better language analysis (stemming, etc.)
- Joins and the ability to do many-to-many filtering
- support for querying via XQuery
- better support for managing dimensions / facets
- much better performance (both for queries and pushing data in)
- crawlers and data integration tools
- better admin tools

And, obviously, services and support.

That said, it's not cheap, so if you don't have a budget for it, Solr isn't a bad option.