- OpenSearchServer
-
OpenSearchServer Developer(s) Emmanuel Keller Initial release Jun 08, 2008 Written in Java, C/C++, PHP Operating system Cross-platform Available in English Type Search engine License GNU General Public License (version 3) Website http://www.open-search-server.com/ OpenSearchServer is an open source application server allowing development of index-based applications like search engines. Available since April 2009 on SourceForge for download, OpenSearchServer was developed under the GPL v3 license and offers a series of full text lexical analyzers and can be installed on different platforms (Windows, Linux, Macintosh).
After being initiated as an inhouse project in a private media group, OpenSearchServer is now supported by Jaeksoft, a commercial company launched in February 2010 and providing services and roadmap guidance for OpenSearchServer.
Main features of OpenSearchServer are : An integrated crawler for databases, web pages and rich documents; a user friendly GUI allowing development of most applications with some clicks through an interface built in Zkoss; snippets; faceting; an html renderer for integrating search results in a page; and monitoring and administration features.
OpenSearchServer is written in Java and it can be integrated into almost any kind of application without the need to produce Java code. REST/XML APIs make OpenSearchServer connectable to other programming languages. The "advanced plugins" capability allows sophisticated customizations.
OpenSearchServer is today available in version 1.2.3 rc2 and it is considered stable by the developer's community. Version 1.1, launched in April 2009, reached the SourceForge top 15, with wide press coverage[1][2][3][4] and many new users worldwide[5].
Contents
History
The OpenSearchServer project began in 2007 in Infopro Group, a French B2B media group made up of 15 subsidiaries with online and offline activities in news and information brokerage. Unable to find an existing Search solution offering an appropriate mix of features, price and ease of use, it was decided to create some software internally which would use available open source components. The three objectives of the project were: versatile feature set allowing addressing needs of all the subsidiaries; easy access to the features through a friendly user interface; and a comprehensive solution with a crawler, an indexer and a query interpreter. Project leader was Emmanuel Keller, CIO, leading a large team of engineers of whom 3 were dedicated to the project. In 2008, the first application was launched and soon after about 10 others followed.
In December 2009, Emmanuel resigned from his position with Infopro, acquired the rights to the solution and created Jaeksoft to develop services for OpenSearchServer. Raphael Perez joined him and they started working together to grow the user base and customer base and create the services. Jaeksoft raised a first round of seed capital in 2011[6].
Features
Written in Java, OpenSearchServer can be run as a standalone server with a servlet container. The following is a list of main features, and these can be extended by using plugin architecture:
- Textual or Boolean type search,
- A crawler allows you to index the following: web pages; rich format documents from files on local and remote systems; and contents from any JDBC database, such as Oracle, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server,
- Full text analyzers and filters allowing indexing and searches in 16 languages,
- The Lucene library, that creates, updates the index and presents the answers to queries using the most efficient algorithms for best performance and response times,
- HTML renderer allowing the integration of the search box in an html/xhtml page, working with PHP and .NET, client library and xml over http API,
- Parsers allowing you to get content and metadata from most documents and formats, such as MS Office, OpenOffice, html/xhtml, xml, Adobe pdf, rtf, txt, mp3/4, wav, torrents,
- A series of caches to accelerate processes and deliver faster applications,
- Monitoring and administration: Alerting services, integrated scheduler, index replication, user management,
- Free online developers' documentation,
- Advanced functionality: faceted search, clustering, filters, snippets, synonyms, stopwords, highlighting, categorization, “find similar”, automatic thumbnail screenshot inclusion, boost/reduce relevance,
- OpenSearchServer exists as a Drupal module and a WordPress module,
- The web interface is built around the Zkoss (ZK) framework.
Competitors
OpenSearchServer competitors include but are not limited to:
- Proprietary applications : Autonomy (now with HP), Exalead (now with Dassault Systems), Sinequa, Microsoft (formely FAST software) …..
- Open Source Projects : Solr, Sphinx,
- Appliances : Google Search Appliance.
References
- ^ http://www.linux-magazine.com/Online/News/Open-Search-Server-1.1-with-Synonym-and-ODF-Support
- ^ http://www.linux-community.de/Internal/Nachrichten/Open-Search-Server-1.1-unterstuetzt-Open-Document-Format-und-Synonyme (German)
- ^ http://www.linux.org.ru/news/opensource/4161990 (Russian)
- ^ http://www.iteye.com/news/10880 (Chinese)
- ^ http://www.open-search-server.com/business_case/mimtid
- ^ http://www.businessinsider.com/opensearchserver-enterprise-search-big-data-2011-7
External links
Categories:- Search engine software
- Free search engine software
- Free cross-platform software
- 2008 software
Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.
