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.For commodity search workloads (general retrieval/faceting) Elastic does a fine job. It scales well and there is good documentation and support.Lucene is the core engine behind both of these solutions.For fun, lets look at the large Enterprise acquisitions over the years:* Verity - bought by Autonomy* Fast - bought by Microsoft (Also known as the Enron of Norway...)* Autonomy - bought by HP (Look at the backstory on this deal!)* Endeca - bought by Oracle* Vivisimo - bought by Oracle* Google - GSA (now Google Cloud Search, hosted solution)Next, follow the path of online acquisitions:* IndexTank - bought by LinkedIn* Swiftype - bought by ElasticThere'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.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.Ping me offline if you have additional questions - spent almost 20 years in the space and ran a search company of my own.