Open Source Enables High-volume Searches

Twitter, Facebook, the Library of Congress -- all of these institutions have mind-numbing amounts of structured and unstructured data that must be indexed and searched quickly. In Twitter's case, that's about 300 million new pieces of information to index every day. So it's not surprising that such institutions would venture into the seemingly untamed world of open-source search applications, not just for the cost savings, but also for the ability to customize and modify applications quickly. Plus, open source has an active community that can help solve related problems.

But what about other enterprise users? Some 80% of the information in the typical enterprise is now unstructured, including texts, emails, blogs and videos, and that percentage is rising, according to Gartner. All of this data potentially holds value, and today every website is expected to query and produce relevant results as fast as the best Internet search engines. "People need search technology [in] virtually everything they do today. Everybody thinks search [capability] is going to be embedded in everything," says Whit Andrews, an analyst at Gartner.