A Comparison of Open Source Search Engines

Christian Middleton, and Ricardo Baeza-Yates

11/04/2008
(Original Publish Date: 10/1/2008)

As the amount of information available on the websites increases, it becomes necessary to give the user the possibility to perform searches over this information. When deciding to install a search engine in a website, there exists the possibility to use a commercial search engine or an open source one. For most of the websites, using a commercial search engine is not a feasible alternative because of the fees that are required and because they focus on large scale sites. On the other hand, open source search engines may give the same functionalities (some are capable of managing large amount of data) as a commercial one, with the benefits of the open source philosophy: no cost, software maintained actively, possibility to customize the code in order to satisfy personal needs, etc.