How to evaluate hosted full-text search solutions?

Question

What are the options when it comes to full-text SaaS / search? How can I evaluate the various options available?

I am looking for something that uses Lucene, solr or sphinx on the server, and provides a REST API to send documents for indexing and performing searches.

I could create my own AM2 AMI, but I would have to configure EBS and other things, control it, etc.

Answer 1

Websolr provides cloud-based Solr with a control panel. It is in private beta at the time of this writing, but you can get the service through Heroku .

Another hosted Solr PowCloud service is also in the private beta, which seems to offer powerful Wordpress integration.

SolrHQ : another beta service providing a hosted Solr solution with Joomla and Wordpress integrations.

Acquia Search offers Solr integration for Drupal sites.

If you decide to create your own instance of EC2, the SolrOnAmazonEC2 page may be useful. Or you can just get LucidWorks Solr for EC2 , which is probably the easiest and fastest way to get Solr on EC2.

Engine Yard provides the Sphinx cloud service .

Answer 2

Indextank is a real-time full-text search solution. It's quite simple to set up (you can get the index in a couple of minutes) and it is very powerful ( Reddit is working on IndexTank). It provides Java, Python, Ruby and Php clients, as well as the Rest API specification. There is awesome customer support (including chat). You must try.

Answer 3

Another option, especially for British people, is http://www.netaphorsearch.com/ . I must indicate that I own Netaphor Ltd. We support the Solr REST API, but also have a PHP connector so you can get up and running quickly.

Answer 4

Take a look at Artirix - UK, but also in the US http://www.artirix.com . I know that they use some sites, such as Globrix.com in the UK based on SOLR, and have many other products for scanning and processing data.

Answer 5

My five cents
http://indexisto.com/
Offers a free hosted Elastic Search if you are ready to advertise in the search results. But in any case, you can start with free and go to advertising without ads.

He also not only hosted Elastic Search, but also prepared to use the Ajax search box (which is really impressive) to embed on your site (mobile and tablet), as well as some useful functions, such as statistics, image resizing. There are several options for filling the index with documents - crawler, API and DB

Answer 6

Another option for lower volume sites is that Midwestern Mac supports Solr search (I own Midwestern Mac, LLC, fyi only).

Although it is not too difficult (if you can make good use of the command line) to provide your own VPS server somewhere ...