Thanks for sharing that, Hoss. That's a really cool bit of history. On Mon, Sep 1, 2025 at 3:41 PM Chris Hostetter <[email protected]> wrote:
> > If you will indulge me a moment of (slightly delayed) nostalgia... > > This past Saturday (I was traveling) marked the 20th anniversary of the > first public acknowledgement of the existence of Solr -- albeit, not by > name... > > https://lists.apache.org/thread/g8t11tf2gs5x2wtdj09o15toxo1q91o7 > Subject: Announcement: Lucene powering CNET.com Product Category Listings > > >> At a high level there are four major pieces... > >> > >> 1) A Servlet which abstracts away most of the Lucene index modification > >> APIs into an HTTP/XML based "web service" by accepting POSTed XML > >> documents to add/update in the index. It also replies to GET search > >> requests using query plugins that have access to an IndexReader. > >> > >> ... > > IIRC... > > At this point in time, Yonik had been working for CNET (on the east coast) > for about a year focused on prototyping a "Lucene Server" -- initially as > a skunkworks project. I had been working (on the west coast) on > "Dynamicly Generated Facet Pages" (secretly) using Lucene since roughly > the same time as Yonik joined the company -- but we didn't know each > other. > > When I was "caught" using Lucene ~ Dec 2004, and told to use the approved > database features instead, the performance numbers I showed in my "Either > replace me or leave me the fuck alone" email gave our CTO something to > chew on, and the excuse Yonik's boss was looking for to unveil their > skunkworks project. > > So Yonik & I were finally introduced ~ Jan 2005 when our projects were > blessed & merged. Yonik focused on the lower level "engine" that > interacted with Lucene, while I focused on implementing the complex biz > requirements for the facets. We both quietly discussed how to architect > everything so the biz logic specific code could live in "plugins" in the > hope of eventually convincing the CTO to let us contribute the main > "server" to Apache. > > Open Source "participation" was a completely new concept to the company at > that point, and it took a lot of approval from multiple tiers of tech > managers for me to even be able to send that email -- but it helped that > my Biz unit site owner (Mark) was really happy with with the engagement > numbers on these new facet pages, and how responsive & interactive they > were (compared with what we had before), so he was happy to let me brag a > little bit. > > Mark's boss was pressing us to try and implement "faceted product catalog > search" (something that would have never been possible with the commercial > search engine we were using at the time) in time for the holiday shopping > season. Which meant I was looking into keyword relevancy tuning (facets > were cool, but we had to match documents at least as well as our previous > engine) while Yonik was putting a lot of effort into performance > improvements to handle the additional traffic -- which included upgrading > from Lucene 1.4 -> 1.9. > > The speed at which the community was moving forward with improvements; > combined with our ability to iterate on new feature & performance > improvements quickly (due to both the open source nature of Lucene, as > well as the community advice to help solve problems we encountered on the > way); combined with the enthusiasm of the biz teams; were a huge factor in > convincing our previously hostile CTO to go "all in" on contributing > "Solr" to the ASF -- less then a year after I got reprimanding for using > Lucene at all. > > > I'm skeptical that I'll still be an active member of the Solr community in > another 20 years -- but I am pretty confident that there will still be an > active community, ... and hopefully they will still be sharing their cool > use cases & accomplishments on the mailing list. > > > > > -Hoss > http://www.lucidworks.com/ > -- http://www.needhamsoftware.com (work) https://a.co/d/b2sZLD9 (my fantasy fiction book)
