Last night our US partners Lucid Imagination announced that LucidWorks, their packaged and supported version of Apache Lucene/Solr, is available on Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing service. It seems like only a few weeks since Amazon announced their own CloudSearch system and no doubt other ‘search as a service’ providers are waiting in the wings (we’re going to need a new acronym as SaaS is already taken!). At first the combination of a search platform based on open source Java code with Microsoft hosting might seem strange, and it raises some interesting questions about the future of Microsoft’s own FAST Search technology – is this final proof that FAST will only ever be part of Sharepoint and never a standalone product? However with search technology becoming more and more of a commodity this is a great option for customers looking for search over relatively small numbers of documents.
Lucid’s offering is considerably more flexible and full-featured than Amazon’s, which we hear is pretty basic with a lack of standard search features like contextual snippets and a number of bugs in the client software. You can see the latter in action at Runar Buvik’s excellent OpenTestSearch website. With prices for the Lucid service ranging from free for small indexes, this is certainly an option worth considering.
