Seeking Profit in Open-Source Search Software - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com

The interest in corporate search systems has increased steadily as businesses deal with ever greater volumes of data, and companies have used Lucene for a wide variety of tasks.

MySpace, for example, will perform searches on its user database to try to determine someone’s age.

“If there’s a person who says he is 18, but all his friends are in the fifth grade, then MySpace can see that,” Mr. Gries said.

Verizon, meanwhile, uses Lucene to help customers find ringtones on its Web site.

More standard uses of the technology revolve around finding internal e-mail messages, photos and other documents. The diverse nature of such files makes corporate search a particularly tough task. It’s also a very sensitive type of technology since companies often rely on corporate search to find documents related to litigation.

There’s big money to be had in this business.

Autonomy, for example, posted a 44 percent rise in revenue to $517 million through the first nine months of 2009. In 2008, Microsoft acquired Fast Search and Transfer for $1.2 billion, hoping to add a deep search edge to its business software. And at Google, the company sells a specialized server appliance to businesses.

Lucid thinks it can undercut these big guys in price. It sells annual support contracts that range from $12,000 up to about $50,000, depending on the level of service.

Since Lucene is open-source, anyone with a pulse and some ambition could set up their own company to rival Lucid with similarly priced or cheaper support services. But like other boil-in-a-baggers, Lucid will tout its deep bench of Lucene experts as its major edge.