Lucene appears to pick up steam

Yahoo! may be making news in web search, but CMS Watch's Kaz Thomas writes about the rise of Apache Lucene, the open source search tool that has seems to be gaining widespread popularity. Thomas says that as part of his research at CMS Watch, he looked for jobs that advertised for people with Lucene experience and saw a big jump in ads with this and related terms. He concludes, based on this, that Lucene is gaining in popularity.

I'm not sure if that's an accurate gauge or not, and it's always difficult to get solid numbers on open source tools. By their nature, they are not products that are bought and sold where you can count the units. People download the software and they may use it or not, but it's clear that I'm seeing Lucene talk in more places and it does seem to be gaining popularity (even if we can't quantify it any more concretely than job keywords).

One company that has formed around selling implementation services for Lucene is Lucid Imagination, which saw an opportunity in a growing marketplace to help companies deal with the complexities of working with open source software. As Thomas points out, it's hard to say if this will have any impact on traditional vendors, but one comment is telling: The writer notes that Percussion recently switched from Convera to Lucene in the latest version of Rhythmyx. It will be interesting to see if we see more companies going in this direction and more companies like Lucid Imagination popping up to take advantage of a growing market.

For more information:
- see Thomas' post on CMS Watch

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