Open source enterprise search with Apache Solr

If you are interested in enterprise search- massive scaling, faceted searching, and other such goodies, more than likely you have looked at commercial products like the FAST ESP platform from FAST Search and Transfer. ESP is a remarkably deep and broad product; like other enterprise-class products, licenses costs can be considerable. If you would like to take advantage of some of the basic features of enterprise search, but you can't afford to license a commercial product like FAST ESP, you should explore the open source Apache Solr plaform.

Solr started as a development project at CNet to enable some of the search/browse features you see on the CNet web site. In 2006, Solr became an incubator sub-project of the Apache Lucene project. Lucene is a search engine toolkit originally written in Java (now with ports to C and C#). On June 6th, 2007, the Solr project team released version 1.2, which adds significant functionality to the core application.

Solr is written in Java and can be run inside any standard Java servlet container such as Tomcat.