[karterk]

Elasticsearch mostly "just works". The latest version of Solr has made clustering easier (requires managing Zookeeper), but before that, it was either ES or nightmare.

Lucene is one of those projects which hardly has any real competition. That's surprising given how many real world software projects have a search requirement. While Lucene is excellent, it's not without flaws and competition is always great.

[m0th87]

FWIW, Elasticsearch builds on Lucene. It's just working at a much higher level of abstraction.

[dclara]

I agree with you, almost every website needs a search server on the backend for people to search their document base, especially for enterprise intranet. Maybe enterprises are using commercial products, such as SharePoint. How about the rest of the small businesses and websites? Maybe the learning curve is steep for every website to adopt so far.

[swah]

Hmm, could that be because they have to compete with free?

[malaporte]

Lucene does have competition, mostly in the commercial world. I know, since I work for one of those companies :p

Solr, ElasticSearch, etc. are mostly concerned about the index/search features, and they do quite a good job there. But this still leaves a huge amount of space for commercial offerings, as core search is only a part of the problem. I'm thinking about connectivity with complex enterprise systems, support for the specific security models of those systems, integration in other systems, etc. Believe me, those problems are not easy to solve.

So, even if we have an index that can most probably match Lucene's feature for feature and quite a lot of things beside, we typically won't go after deals where simple search is the only requirement. Instead we focus on larger deals with more complex requirements. And we're doing quite well, thank you :)