We spent Friday at the riverside offices of Sirius Corporation, our support partners, for the first and hopefully not the last of their Open Days on open source enterprise search. We were lucky to have Mike Davis, a very well known and highly experienced analyst to open the talks – despite suffering from flu he gave an engaging talk on why open source enterprise search software should be your first port of call, and how you should only consider closed source options when you need particular features they provide.
We then gave a quick Introduction to Open Source Search, detailing the various packages available (from Apache Lucene/Solr to Xapian and Sphinx) and showing a quick Solr-powered demo we’d built to search some pages from the BBC Music website. Using the programmer’s first choice for an example query (the ever reliable ‘foo*’) we discovered the wonderfully named Original Rabbit Foot Spasm Band – which interestingly you can’t find via the BBC’s own site search engine due to lack of wildcard support.
Andrew Savory, Sirius’ CTO and Apache Foundation member, then gave a presentation on what an Apache project actually is and how best to engage with an open source community – very useful for those considering open source for the first time. The morning finished with a delicious barbeque on the riverbank provided by Sirius. We thought the event went very well and we’d love to confirm the rumour that this will become a regular event. Thanks to all at Sirius for organising and hosting the day and we look forward to returning.
