Open Source Search Myth 4 - Features and Capabilities Lag

This is part of a series addressing the misconception that open source search is too risky for companies to use. You can find the introduction to the series here; and Part 3, Skills required In-House, here.

Part 4: Features and Capabilities Lag

Keeping up with the latest and greatest technology is important, especially when there is a great deal of innovation in a field. Enterprise search is one such field.

In this post I'll address the claim that "Production functionality may trail in specific features relative to commercial search firms".

First, let me remind you that many of the coolest advanced capabilities in modern search platforms is delivered using third party products integrated into the actual search product. Examples:

Entity extraction: Cool stuff, and part of many search platforms. Often implemented using technology from companies like Basis Technology, Pingar, and others.

Non-English support: Required for any large-scale enterprise. Think Basis Technology again; or pretty darned good open source filters.

Document format support: Leaders here were smaller companies that were eventually purchased by larger search companies: Keyview (not Autonomy); Stellent (now Oracle); ISYS (now IBM). Open source Tika.

Sentiment Analysis: Identify 'positive' versus 'negative' sentiment, using products from Lexalytics, Attensity, SAS, LingPipe and others. 

My point is not that large enterprise search platform companies do not include some cool new technologies in their products: it's just that the 'cool' usually comes from a third party that can be licensed for use in any platform, not just "commercial" ones. 

And, when you use open source platforms, you always have the option of doing a feature yourself - either in-house, or using a consulting firm.

And you might not be aware of capabilities where open source Solr is ahead of many commercial vendors. For example, consider Geo search, which lets you easily search for 'documents' relevant to a particular location.  And it can even be used to answer questions like "what managers are on-duty on Saturday night at the LA store".

I will say that Microsoft, in its SharePoint 2013, has implemented a very nice query boosting tool that, as far as I can tell, was created in-house - I doubt it was in the FAST pipeline at the acquisition. 

But give that caveat, I'd ask, what with all of recent acquisition and mergers, whether any 'enterprise search' company implemented major new capability like pivot facets, entity extraction and more - without licensing the technology from an outside company?