The Rise of Open-source Search

Wow! I'm excited to write this blog today being the day that Open-Source Search moved a huge step forward. I have been working with Lucene for over 8 years now spending an enormous amount of time on adding features, fixing bugs, writing documentation and eventually bringing the project forward together with an awesome gang of committers. I think I can state that Lucene has become one of the most successful Open-Source libraries serving million of users worldwide. Yet, there was always something missing in the picture when you need to go out and build a search system especially when it gets to reliability, fail-over and distributed search. You know those things are hard and have always been out of scope for the Lucene library. A couple of years ago Elasticsearch came into the picture offering an extremely promising idea by an extremely passionate engineer. What can I say, “it's grown up", here comes Elasticsearch the company!

With the rise of NoSQL, Hadoop and being Big-Data everywhere Lucene's star didn't shine that bright without offering all these features out of the box and related projects like Solr are slowly catching up with scaling capabilities. But going from an idea to a mature and stable software is a pretty rocky path and it takes time and effort to go. Elasticsearch has gone down that path with all the hard problems in mind from day one. Hey, this is awesome - you know, for search!

However, it's not just Buzz! 4 weeks ago at the Berlin Buzzwords conference you could literally feel how much momentum Elasticsearch gained in the last couple of years. Rooms were packed, engineers talking about success stories, limitations, features and improvements all over the place. This is healthy in a lot of ways and a good indicator that it's time to take Elasticsearch to the next level.

When Shay, Steven, Uri and myself first talked about the idea to join forces and to establish Elasticsearch as a company it was already obvious to me that this is an enormous chance for Open-Source Search in general as well as Lucene being the underlying technology. As a company we heavily rely on the features, maturity and stability of the software we incorporate into Elasticsearch and in turn on the health of the Open Source community. It's our job and responsibility to maintain it and push it forward.

I'm looking forward to a great time working together with great engineers on hard problems making the Elasticsearch user experience as smooth as possible and making Lucene the only choice when you need Search - and trust me you need it!