Grant’s Grunts: Lucene Edition

Some of you may have noted that I’ve been quieter than usual lately.  Well, the reason is I was preparing for the launch of the new company I helped found: Lucid Imagination.   Now, I don’t blog too often about what I do for work on this site, other than it is Lucene, Solr and sometimes Mahout related, but, I am obviously pretty excited about Lucid.  We are offering commercial support for Lucene and Solr, training, consulting and value-add software.  In the latter category, we’ve started things off with a monitoring tool for Solr called Solr Gaze, as well as some other custom pieces that people should find useful in their work with Lucene and Solr.

Another thing I’m particularly excited about is our search functionality (running on Solr of course).  It’s in beta (send feedback to find@lucidimagination.com) right now, but it aims to provide search for all things in the Lucene ecosystem: Lucene, Solr, Nutch, Mahout, Tika, Droids and all the Lucene ports (PyLucene coming soon) hosted at the ASF.  We’ve indexed the websites, mailing lists, wikis, JIRA, javadocs, etc.  Additionally, we provide multi-select faceting to allow people to easily search and navigate across projects.  Simply do your search, and then select the projects or sources that you want included in the results.  Stay tuned for more details on how we implemented all this stuff.

Lastly, we’ve done a bunch of articles and a few interviews with people in the Lucene community, including Doug Cutting, Chris Hostetter and Ryan McKinley.  Have a read or a listen and let me know what you think.