We know streamlined search utility building is a major need in the tech industry right now.  Amazon's recent Cloud Search announcement is evidence of that.  For the Lucene and Solr users out there, Lucid Imagination has been working for several years on similar offerings around it's LucidWorks Enterprise platform.  They take a lot of the learning curve out of setting up complex Solr and Lucene deployments, and about a month prior to Amazon's announcement, they released their own cloud hosted and managed service of their product - Lucid Cloud.

Read the LWE Software Review to get a better picture of what it can do...

Today Lucid announced an update to their LWE software.  Here were some of the highlights:

Crawler Configuration

• Ability to schedule external data source crawling
• New connectors for high-speed Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS),
• Twitter and Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS)
• New framework to build custom connectors

 

Business Rules Integration

• Out-of-the-box integration with Drools Business Rules Management System (BRMS)
• New framework for integrating other BRMSs
• Ability to integrate business processes to influence search results and relevancy, modify facets, sort, and filter parameters, and divert search queries to a landing page. Business rules also allow businesses to modify the documents during the indexing process.
  
  

Dynamic Fields

• Creation and configuration of fields directly from the user interface and REST API
• Schema-free configuration

 

Advanced Memory Settings

• Ability to manage buffer and cache settings directly from a secure admin user interface

 

Additional Important Enhancements

• Configuration of real-time search directly from the user interface
• Ability to crawl and index data at web scale through Nutch integration
• Ability to promote documents to the top of the search results