IndexTank vs. Thinking Sphinx vs. Solr

When LinkedIn acquired IndexTank and announced that IndexTank services would be discontinued within six months, current customers might have felt an unexpected pang of worry. Not to mention millions of redditors, whose search functionality improved light-years when reddit adopted IndexTank last year.

LinkedIn preemptively assuaged such fears by promising to make key components of the IndexTank API open-source, allowing other cloud providers to provide IndexTank-compatible search services requiring little to no client-side reconfiguration.

But why worry about IndexTank at all, when other open-source search solutions, like Lucene/Solr, are so widely available?

Gautam Rege explains why. For instance:

"Accessibility is awesome. I can create and update documents on IndexTank at will! That is I dont need to index / re-index or add delta’s to my database, because IndexTank is not dependent on my database or even my schema!"

Read Gautam's full discussion here.