2016: The Year In Review

It has been another whirlwind year in the world of search here at Lucidworks!
First a few customer successes from the field:

How Infoblox Moved from Google Search Appliance to Lucidworks Fusion in Just 5 Weeks

When GSA got EOLed, it left everyone in a lurch. Network security company Infoblox needed a replacement – and fast. They cut their licensing costs in half and dev time from months to weeks with Lucidworks Fusion. Full case study.

And as you spike your nog and brave the snow (or make a getaway to the beach), let’s do a quick Casey Kasem countdown of the top search stories and blog posts of 2016:

Better Feature Engineering with Spark, Solr, and Lucene Analyzers

Steve Rowe’s post on how to use the spark-solr open source toolkit to break down full text into words (tokens) using Apache Lucene’s text analysis framework.

Solr Suggesters and Fusion for Less Typing

Mitzi Morris walked us through implementing Solr suggester components in a Fusion query pipeline to provide the auto-complete functionality end users expect.

What’s New in Apache Solr 6

The Apache Solr community celebrated the release of Solr 6 which included improved defaults for similarity, better date-time formatting, support for executing parallel SQL queries across collections, new streaming capabilities and more. Read the full rundown or watch the video of Cassandra Targett’s webinar.

RIP Google Search Appliance

Search giant Google announced the end-of-life for their workhorse Google Search Appliance and pointed towards future enterprise products focused in the cloud. Grab a tissue and read Lucidworks CEO Will Hayes’s eulogy.

Solr’s DateRangeField – How Does It Perform?

Erick Erickson brought some clarity to Solr’s DateRangeField and how it fits more naturally with some of the ways we need to support searching dates in documents.

example/files – a Concrete Useful Domain-Specific Example of bin/post and /browse

Erik Hatcher did a three part series demonstrating how to build a simple Solr app with just a few simple commands. First getting data into Solr using bin/post, then visualizing your search results with /browse, and finally putting it together for a domain-specific example.

Solr as a SparkSQL DataSource

Timothy Potter and Kiran Chitturi showed you how to use Solr as a SparkSQL Data Source with one tutorial focused on read/query operations and a second tutorial showing you how to write data using the SparkSQL DataFrame API.

Using Word2Vec in Fusion for Better Search Results

Lasya Marla showed how to use the Word2Vec modeling technique for natural language processing with Fusion.

Revolution 2016

And of course a rollicking good time at Lucene/Solr Revolution in Boston with sessions about cognitive computing with IBM Watson, optimal findability at Salesforce, Solr highlighting at Bloomberg, and keynotes from Lucidworks CEO Will Hayes on the future of search, CTO Grant Ingersoll’s all-emoji finale. and another hysterical edition of Stump the Chump. Browse the full archive of videos on YouTube and slide decks on SlideShare.