As experienced search developers know, the key question with Lucene and its sister project, Solr, has never been "will this software do what I want?" but "what will it really take to get it to do what I want? And is it faster and cheaper to do it with a commercial search product?"

We've long been following the Lucene project, and its proliferation over the past decade - not just its adoption by enterprises and government agencies worldwide, but also by commercial WCXM, DAM and DM vendors looking for a capable search backbone for their own application search - is perhaps the most prominent spread of any technology we've seen (with the possible exception of SharePoint.) In the latest version of our Enterprise Search evaluation report, we look at the latest capabilities of the Solr/Lucene duo, so you can assess in detail if it's right for you.

Endeca, a longtime preferred search product of retailers and manufacturers, was acquired by Oracle in late 2011. It's now part of a larger Oracle suite of ecommerce products, and we've looked at the evolution of the product since then in the latest version of this research, as well.

As always, if you have any questions as you select or tune your search engine, we'd love to hear from you.