views:

63

answers:

1

Hey guys

Just looking for some search and indexing services for our sites, and wondered if you guys could recommend anything?

our requirements:

  • The service can either index via http, or direct access to our database.
  • It's gotta be just really simple to use, and set up
  • provide a simple API so we can get the results programmatically and do what we want with it
  • ideally free, or very cheap

so far we've looked at Yahoo Boss and Lucene. Any pros, cons, or opinions for those?

Lucene's looking good. We're a .NET house so LINQ to Luncene looks cool, and of course the .NET port Lucene.NET. But by all means, it can be any technology.

Cool, thanks for your help!

+5  A: 

I would recommend Solr. Lucene technology, but server-side.

Patrick Allaert
+1. Solr is fantastic. Queries can be invoked over HTTP, and data is returned in XML or JSON form. Recommend it highly.
Chris R
cool, thanks guys. I'm not totally clear on what you mean by "but server-side"? cool, cheers
andy
Patrick means that you only need to install Solr on one server machine, and then you can use it over HTTP, without any Lucene code running on the client. Therefore, if your client understands JSON and can make HTTP calls, this is enough to create an application. You do not need to handle the nitty-gritty of Lucene, and believe me most people do not WANT to handle the nitty-gritty of Lucene...
Yuval F
cool, thanks Yuval. Performance is also a very big issue for us...trafficking large amounts of data over http is a concern...what do you guys think?
andy