Ever since Lucene became an Apache top-level project years back, organizations have asked us if free search was right for them. With commercial platforms costing well over $200KUS just to license, free sounds pretty good. But a successful search project is more than just search; and to be successful, you need to make sure not only whether you are ready for open source search (OSS); you have to verify that open source search is ready for you.

In this talk, NIE founder Miles Kehoe will discuss the differences between open source and commercial search platforms, with a focus on:

• Identifying what you need for an OSS successful search implementation
• Metrics to evaluate how well OSS meets your complete search requirements
• The key capabilities that go beyond retrieval that you never realized you need
• What to expect when you start your first OSS project