A while back, I wrote about our decision to expand our coverage of Apache Lucene for the Search and Information Access Report, based on what seemed like an accelerating rate of adoption of Lucene and related technologies. That trend appears to be continuing unabated. As this graphic from Indeed.com shows, job listings that contain the terms Lucene, Solr, and Hadoop (three interrelated Apache projects that tend to be mentioned together) have skyrocketed of late. (Solr is the web app framework built on Lucene, and Hadoop is the Apache open-source implementation of Google's famed MapReduce distributed-computing programming model.)

It's too soon to know whether Lucene's continued meteoric rise in popularity will eventually spell trouble for establshed information-retrieval players like Autonomy, Endeca, or Open Text. It seems premature -- maybe even preposterous -- to suggest such a possibility. Then again, not so long ago, it seemed preposterous that people would someday carry telephones in their pockets. Funny how things change.