Ask HN: Are Lucene/Solr/ES Still Used for Search?
Very much so. For retail/catalog search SOLR dominates. There's a lot more customization available for relevancy/ranking OOB than Elastic. Drawbacks are managing indexing - SOLR cloud is much harder to manage.<p>For commodity search workloads (general retrieval/faceting) Elastic does a fine job. It scales well and there is good documentation and support.<p>Lucene is the core engine behind both of these solutions.<p>For fun, lets look at the large Enterprise acquisitions over the years:<p>* Verity - bought by Autonomy<p>* Fast - bought by Microsoft (Also known as the Enron of Norway...)<p>* Autonomy - bought by HP (Look at the backstory on this deal!)<p>* Endeca - bought by Oracle<p>* Vivisimo - bought by Oracle<p>* Google - GSA (now Google Cloud Search, hosted solution)<p>Next, follow the path of online acquisitions:<p>* IndexTank - bought by LinkedIn<p>* Swiftype - bought by Elastic<p>There's a number of interesting independent players still. Coveo plays in the Enterprise space, but it's a hard market. Algolia is doing great in the commodity online search space and seems to be growing well.<p>This is an area I think is open to more competition. Especially with AI/ML technologies available around Document Understanding - the Enterprise market is open for a good on-prem upstart to really take off.<p>Ping me offline if you have additional questions - spent almost 20 years in the space and ran a search company of my own.