While I still find myself incapable of giving a satisfying answer to those asking the question, “What’s the best enterprise search engine?” -- in the same vein with “What’s the best CMS?” -- I have to admit that there’s one that stands out based on its activity and progress in the past few years, particularly when it comes to application search. And the name to the search engine is Lucene.

Let’s start with a brief introduction to Lucene, in case some of you are not as up-to-speed. Lucene’s development goes back to 1997, before it became an Apache Foundation project in 2001. Lucene has become a poster child for enterprise open source software, achieving overwhelming popularity and widespread usage in free and commercial products alike. Often, you will hear Solr in the same breath with Lucene. Solr is a search platform built on top of Lucene. (We have newly-updated and more detailed evaluation of Lucene and Solr in our Enterprise Search report.)

Why Lucene is important today to a much larger community of technologists than just enterprise search aficionados is because if you carefully look under the covers of many Web CMSs and Digital Asset Management Systems, you will see some variation of Lucene/Solr in those systems. It would take several pages to list all the enterprise information management systems that use Lucene/Solr as their built-in search engine. The reason I say “some variation” is because most every vendor chooses to implement and tweak Lucene in their own way. You can potentially add your customizations on top of that as well.

The bottom line is Lucene/Solr can be very powerful in the right hands. But there are also quite a few features that are not as mature or hands-down missing in this popular search offering. You can reach for the diamonds in the sky, but know that you may have to put in additional work polishing that diamond in the rough that you get out-of-the-box with your CMS or DAM system.