Last time out, I discussed what happens when there is lack of competition in a marketplace -- that in the end both innovation and user experience and ability to act against emerging opportunities suffers.

Meanwhile, over at the Web Managers Group blog, I recently wrote that the WCXM marketplace is witnessing an increasing gap between what vendors are touting, versus what organizations have the maturity to actually deploy and manage.

The search market has similar, if distinct challenges to address right now. If there was risk in the minds of those either using or considering using IDOL for Enterprise Search scenarios, recent events will have compounded them. The disruption caused just puts further wind into the sails of Solr/Lucene and its increasingly vociferous proponents.

Some of this is perfectly legitimate technical critique, some more grounded in the belief that open source is always greater than proprietary, whatever the circumstance or scenario. As we know, licensing is way down the list of priorities you should be looking at when judging fitness for purpose.

However, I won't re-tread that well-worn argument here. Instead, another concern: That the undoubted technical prowess of Solr/Lucene is obscured to almost everyone behind an almost impenetrable wall of tech-speak. Tech-speak that unless you are au fait with the lexicon not of search, but the Apache search stack specifically, will be beyond comprehension.

For example, the 3rd bullet point on Lucidwork's "Highlights of Solr 4" reads:

"Immunity to split-brain issues due to Zookeeper's Paxos distributed consensus protocols"

Now, I'm all for not dumbing-down technical documentation to such an extent that it becomes full of marketing speak, but I'm wondering whether someone investigating Solr 4 might require something of an abridgement here. Indeed, given that Zookeeper integration is actually new in Solr 4, I wonder whether even those familiar with Solr 3 might have difficulty making sense of that sentence at first glance?

OK, I'm being a little selective here. Not all documentation kicks off in such an alarmingly arcane manner, but it does illustrate the challenge that workaday customers face trying to grapple with the Lucene/Solr ecosystem.

Let us know if we can help you decode this landscape...