Interesting bit of early Solr history, thanks for sharing! Blog post candidate for the Solr web page?
Let me join you down memory lane as well. Back in 2005, I was working at FAST Search & Transfer, which at the time was considered state of the art in enterprise search. Our engine, written in C++, offered impressive search and faceting capabilities—though it came with a hefty price tag, as well as hardware requirements. Only a few years earlier, we had lost a potential deal with a well-known classifieds site because our faceting code was still buggy and underperforming. Faceting imo was the killer feature of Solr! My first encounter with Lucene came in 2006, while I was consulting for FAST on an EU research project called DILIGENT. The project focused on building distributed compute infrastructure—they called it GRID computing—complete with SOA and all the buzzwords of the day. The indexing and search layer was powered by FAST ESP, but I was tasked with integrating Lucene as a free, alternative engine. I still remember being struck by how Lucene was both faster and produced a far smaller index footprint than FAST. A few years later, as FAST customers started looking for a replacement when Microsoft (the new owner) discontinued the product, I went full-time Solr. It turned out to be the perfect replacement, even for the largest clusters! Jan > 1. sep. 2025 kl. 21:39 skrev Chris Hostetter <[email protected]>: > > > 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/
