We are happy to announce the release of Fusion 3, the newest version of our platform for building search and data applications.

Ship Better Apps Faster

With Fusion 3, we’ve focused on accelerating time-to-value. We give you the capabilities to quickly deploy powerful search apps that index all your data and give end users a compelling, productive experience while scaling to billions of documents and millions of users.

In earlier versions of Fusion, we had the essential features to building rich, capable applications. Learning from our customers who have deployed Fusion, Fusion 3 is focused on UX designed to surface existing features faster, and bring new capabilities of search and machine learning to a broader audience – not just hard core developers. For example, aggregating user behavior to enhance relevance (aka signals) is a founding feature of Fusion. With Fusion 3, signal feedback is on by default and can be implemented by passing the data in with no other setup required.

This shift from features to workflows supports developers as they grow in their understanding of how to build effective data-driven applications. In the early days of application development, workflows aid the user in getting to value quickly as they move from, “How do I reliably stand this thing up?” to building their first application. Later, with more experience under their belt, Fusion delivers as a platform by allowing you to apply more advanced techniques like machine learning and natural language processing. And even with these more advanced technologies, our goal with Fusion 3 and beyond is to make them as easy to use as possible.

What’s New in Fusion 3

Data Set to App in Minutes

Getting a search app up and running shouldn’t take weeks. With Fusion 3’s new streamlined setup, you can go from data set to working search-ready app in a matter of minutes. This guided configuration also includes faceting, field mapping, and other ETL transformations.

Point-and-Click Relevance Tuning

Simple adjustments to relevancy scoring shouldn’t require your engineers to get involved. Fusion 3’s Query Workbench gives you point-and-click relevancy configuration to boost specific results or even specific conditions. It also allows you to tune results for increased relevance and test changes before they go to production.

ETL Preview

Our Index Workbench is where you manage and organize your index pipelines and other extract/load/transform processes. The new preview feature allows you to see how different configurations will affect your collections before they’re indexed.

Powerful Parsing

Fusion connects to your data wherever it lives whether behind your firewall or in the cloud. Fusion 3’s new parsing framework ensures every document is indexed accurately no matter its format or type. Even nested complex documents are supported. Fusion 3 comes with parsers including CSV, archive (zip/tar), JSON, text, and Tika (including Office, HTML, PDF, multimedia, video).

SQL Everywhere

A common hurdle with new search apps and platforms is having to learn a whole new set of commands and operators to get to your data. Fusion 3 includes full SQL compatibility, so you can query your index with familiar SQL commands you already know. And of course, there are endpoints so you can hook into other favorite services, integrations, and applications.

Object Import/Export

We’re introducing the ability to export, import, and share the heart of your Fusion app or configuration. You can now share collection configurations, pipeline setups, schedule listings, aggregation settings, dashboard layouts, and other objects as easily as you would share a favorite cocktail recipe. This makes it easy for you to reuse your recipe among your Fusion apps – or replicate configurations from dev to QA to to staging production.

And Much More

  • Fusion 3 also has reduced resource requirements including improved indexing throughput.
  • The dynamic duo of open core with Apache Solr 6.3 and Spark 1.6.3 under the hood.
  • And all of this in a 25% smaller download package.

Ready to Learn More?

Join us for one or all of our upcoming webinars showing you how to use Fusion 3 to build powerful search apps.

Fusion 3 Overview
Feb 1 @ 11am PST

Join Lucidworks CTO and Solr committer Grant Ingersoll for a walkthrough of what’s new and improved with Fusion 3. You learn how Fusion 3’s streamlined setup takes you from data set to working search app in a matter of minutes. We’ll show you how to preview ETL processes before they go to production, view a before/after view of relevancy adjustments before they go live, and more. Full details and registration.

Build Site Search in an Hour
Feb 15 @ 11am PST

This session will show you how to use Lucidworks View and Fusion to easily build and deploy site search in less than one hour. Even with multiple data sources, data transformations, and user interface development, a full enterprise search project can be completed in just an hour – compared to the usual 6 months. Full details and registration.

Building Conversational Search
March 1 @ 11am PST

In this webinar, we look at how search is evolving to be more like spoken conversation. New approaches enabled by Fusion 3 allow the end user to type in their normal everyday business language and get back meaningful results. Full details and registration.

Building Customer-Targeted Search
March 15 @ 11am PST

In this session, we’ll explore how to build customer-targeted search to create a tailored, customized search experience for every user so you can increase relevance – and revenues. Full details and registration.

About Andy Wibbels

Read more from this author

LEARN MORE

Contact us today to learn how Lucidworks can help your team create powerful search and discovery applications for your customers and employees.