Anyone use Recommind, Autonomy or FAST with .NET?

Question

We're evaluating some enterprise search servers and would like to have some developer feedback on the API's of Recommind, Autonomy and/or FAST (now owned by Microsoft). We're a .NET shop so we'd either be using web services (xml) or some kind of API wrappers to hook into the search application. Anyone use any of these products before - especially with .NET? Anything to watch out for? Even if you aren't using .NET I'd still like to hear about your experiences. Thanks.

Answer 1

Autonomy IDOL uses a web interface for it's API and usage. It's query string based and pretty simple to use. The response is typically XML, but there are options on most status reporting commands for HTML output for easier human readability.

I personally haven't gotten too deep into interacting with IDOL, but it's on my project list. Mainly status type apps to make sure that all the content is indexed and then some quick search apps.

Answer 2

I have been working with Autonomy IDOL's API for two years now and i find it very straight forward and easy to interact with. The API seems to be kept quite consistent and there are just a few minor changes between releases.

The API is quite well documented and it is very readable.

Since Autonomy has very limited admin interface you have to build most of that from scratch. Autonomy will tell you they have an admin interface, but do not take their word for it. Try to test it yourself. So i would take a really good look at Fast that i have heard have much more admin functions built in for both Search editors (index manipulation and query analysis stuff) and administrators. This will save you time!

You should also consider Luscene/Solr. There is very much happening for them now, and many enhancements for enterprise search uses. I find the api and especially the config not as easy to interact with as Autonomy though.