Open Source alternative to "Google Appliance" for intranet search?

Question

Are there any alternative open source solutions (with a web console)?

Solution 1

Try this: http://www.flax.co.uk/

(I have no experience with this product or other enterprise search products).

Solution 2

Solr, from the Apache Lucene project. Excerpt from the web site

http://lucene.apache.org/solr/

Solr is an open source enterprise search server based on the Lucene Java search library, with XML/HTTP and JSON APIs, hit highlighting, faceted search, caching, replication, a web administration interface and many more features. It runs in a Java servlet container such as Tomcat.

Solution 3

Its not open source, but Microsoft Search 4.0 is free at this link

I would say its worth trying, I liked the formatting of the results returned, but the problem was the results would include documents a user could not access due to security. So it was no good for us since document names can contain restricted information too, such as "Bob-Warning Letter.doc"

Solution 4

I have used 'htdig' in past for intranet search. It is good and indexes pdf documents by default. Once you can add filters that can translate documents to text format for indexing, it will start supporting other formats as well.

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Comments

[voretaq7]

Product and Service recommendations are generally a poor fit for Server Fault (see the FAQ and this blog post). There are plenty of search engine appliances and software available -- Google can help you find some, and you can then match them up to your environment and needs...

[SpaceManSpiff]

Sounds like the same thing Microsoft Search Server will do, but with more effort.

[Martin K.]

More effort but free of charge!

[SpaceManSpiff]

Microsoft's Search Server Express is completely free of charge and the only difference between it and the Enterprise edition is that Express does not have load balancing. By the way need for DNKA plug in according to your link has a small charge for commercial use. Funny how google requires you to use their hardware for their enterprise searches. I think google could clean up in this area if they released a server edition software that could be installed on your own server.

[Martin K.]

The information from the page is outdated! DNKA is now free for commercial use. The solution is absolutly free of charge. When I try to download the express edition, everywhere "Demo" or "Test" is shown!? Why should google require to use their hardware? The solution I mentioned is free of charge and requires only an windows environment. It works also with Mozilla as client (eg. from Unix/Linux boxes). I've read that the google search performance is significantly better.

[SpaceManSpiff]

Try this link - microsoft.com/enterprisesearch/en/us/… You were likely trying download the full enterprise which is a trial edition. Cool that your DNKA is free now. So is this one. What I was trying to say is that a company to have an intranet search from google (without it being a mashup) requires a google appliance. It would be great if google did a software only enterprise intranet search, that was not a mashup of their desktop search & 3rd party tools. More admin's would prefer that I think.

[Martin K.]

They have souch a product (Google Appliance) for sale. I don't think that they'll give it away for free. Google Desktop search doesn't rely to any specific hardware (excepting x86, but that's your windows solution too).

[Russ]

link is broken... just use flax.co.uk

[Day]

Not much coming out of that project recently. See the Is Flax Alive? discussion on the flax-discuss group from July 2010 and the latest post from September 2011 which got no response.

[dana]

SOLR seems very cool. The issue is how to crawl/index web pages without Nutch? I work with ASP.Net and there does not seem to be a de-facto crawler for SOLR that works natively with Windows.