Enterprise search goes Open Source
The Searchdaimon enterprise search product is now available as open source software. The company says it is the only enterprise-grade alternative to Solr available at http://www.searchdaimon.com.
The source code itself has been made publicly available at GitHub. Organizations can use it directly or build search-based applications on top of it, using widely supported programming languages and APIs.
A recent series of studies by Stephen E. Arnold, managing director of ArnoldIT and expert in online search systems, identified dozens of open source content processing systems. The problem is, Arnold said, “Organizations looking for an alternative to Lucene/Solr or a widely supported SQL (structured query language) solution have to trade off performance and complexity to obtain the benefits of open source software.”
“Solr has some performance and usability issues. Searchdaimon has engineered a solution that processes content and delivers query response times superior to other open source search solutions,” said Runar Buvik, Searchdaimon’s chief technical officer.
Buvik also administers a website where a prospective users of an enterprise search system can run a query across nine different systems. Visit the site at http://www.opentestsearch.com/.
Arnold said, “Traditional approaches to enterprise search and content processing put most organizations in handcuffs. The licenses and the proprietary software limit the customers’ ability to tailor a solution to meet specific needs.”
“Together with the open source community, we hope we can build one of the best solutions for enterprise search yet. We will also be much freer to incorporate other GPL-licensed code into our system and make it easier for the community to contribute code. This will let more connectors be made, and better interoperability with third party software,” Buvik said.
“The Searchdaimon approach provides organizations with freedom to enhance the system and allows developers to contribute code which will greatly extend the capabilities of the Searchdaimon high-speed system,” Arnold said.
Searchdaimon is the result of an evolution of academic research at the same university that developed the original Fast Search & Transfer search system.
The Searchdaimon system offers filtering, sorting, content federation, search suggestions, spell checking of user queries, stemming and lemmatization, a graphic interface for the administrative services, logs, statistics, and other components of a modern enterprise information retrieval system.
The Searchdaimon appliance can be run within VMware, Xen, and VirtualBox as a “virtual system.”Searchdaimon can also run from the Amazon cloud or an organization’s existing service provider.
Searchdaimon says is the first open source search engine to have full document level security, and with an optional connection to Microsoft Active Directory, the system can easily be snapped into Microsoft environment.
“Searchdaimon delivers a robust, high-performance system and provides both open source developers and organizations with a solution that delivers enterprise-grade functions with the agility required to meet today’s business demands,” Arnold said.