Google Search, FAST ESP and Lucene

Question

Has anybody come across or created a functionality comparison document between the various enterprise search options like Google Search Appliance, Fast ESP, Lucene?

Any helpful pointers or links much appreciated.

Answer 1

Strangely enough I have, sort of. It's so dependent on your use case and $$$ requirements though that such an open ended question is pretty useless. If you need XML indexing, with things like XPath type queries, then FAST is the only way to go. Trouble is, it costs &&&. If you don't have a lot of hardware or $$$ then you will never beat Lucene's searching ability. Lucene's biggest strength (other then it's insanely fst indexing/searching) is it's extensibility. If you have a couple developers willing to write their own parsers, tokenizers, and query optimizers then there are no limits to Lucene. But if you need a COTS solution with almost no upkeep then the Goggle Appliance is pretty hard to beat.