It’s now eleven years since we started Flax (initially as Lemur Consulting Ltd) in late July 2001, deciding to specialise in search application development with a focus on open source software. At the time the fallout from the dotcom crash was still evident and like today the economic picture was far from rosy. Since few people even knew what a search engine was (Google was relatively new and had only started selling advertising a year before) it wasn’t always easy for us to find a market for our services.
When we visited clients they would list their requirements and we would then tell them how we believed open source search could help (often having to explain the open source movement first). Things are different these days: most of our enquiries come from those who have already chosen open source search software such as Apache Lucene/Solr but need our help in installing, integrating or supporting it. There’s also a rise in those clients considering applications and techniques outside the traditional site search or intranet search – web scraping and crawling for data aggregation, taxonomies and automatic classification, automatic media monitoring and of course massive scalability, distributed processing and Big Data. Even the UK government are using open source search.
So after all this time I’m tending to agree with Roger Magoulas of O’Reilly: open source won, and we made the right choice all those years ago.
