Byrne Tony Byrne

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Lucene and the return of bundled CMS and Search

25-Mar-2009

Tags: Web Content Management, Implementation, Information Architecture, Marketplace at Large, Open Source, Google Search Appliance, Lucene and Solr

Today we released some findings pointing out how Web CMS vendors are increasingly embedding website search into their packages, returning full-circle to the early days of our industry, when most customers expected bundled content management and site search.

From the release:

    By understanding the structure of the Web CMS repository, the search engine can access more relevant data, and deliver richer results, more easily than a 3rd-party solution

To be sure, most Web CMS vendors have always provided sort of embedded repository search for authors and managers, but this is about searching the published website -- a source of perennial frustration that spawned the Google Search Appliance. But it turns out that for many customers, Google just doesn't cut it.

A big driver here is the rise of the broad open source search framework, Lucene, which gives vendors a flexible framework -- if they take the time and effort to integrate it carefully.

By our latest count, the following vendors among those we cover now embed Lucene: Alfresco, Clickability, Day, DotNetNuke, Escenic, eZ publish, Goss, Hannon Hill, Hippo, Magnolia, FatWire, OpenCms, Percussion, Refresh, Telerik, and Vyre. Others are considering it.

As the release says, this trend brings many potential benefits for you the customer, but also some potential pitfalls. We've seen some great Lucene integrations, and some really crappy ones. Consult The Web CMS Report for more details.

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