Very much so. For retail/catalog search SOLR dominates. There's a lot more customization available for relevancy/ranking OOB than Elastic. Drawbacks are managing indexing - SOLR cloud is much harder to manage.
For commodity search workloads (general retrieval/faceting) Elastic does a fine job. It scales well and there is good documentation and support.
Lucene is the core engine behind both of these solutions.
For fun, lets look at the large Enterprise acquisitions over the years:
* Verity - bought by Autonomy
* Fast - bought by Microsoft (Also known as the Enron of Norway...)
* Autonomy - bought by HP (Look at the backstory on this deal!)
* Endeca - bought by Oracle
* Vivisimo - bought by Oracle
* Google - GSA (now Google Cloud Search, hosted solution)
Next, follow the path of online acquisitions:
* IndexTank - bought by LinkedIn
* Swiftype - bought by Elastic
There's a number of interesting independent players still. Coveo plays in the Enterprise space, but it's a hard market. Algolia is doing great in the commodity online search space and seems to be growing well.
This is an area I think is open to more competition. Especially with AI/ML technologies available around Document Understanding - the Enterprise market is open for a good on-prem upstart to really take off.
Ping me offline if you have additional questions - spent almost 20 years in the space and ran a search company of my own.
* Fast - bought by Microsoft (Also known as the Enron of Norway...)
That one was painful to live through, we got forced to migrate to Windows and everything went sideways. That was almost 10 years ago with quite a big cluster (tens of nodes).
Definitely. Product catalog information as a whole doesn't change often. Price and availability does. With retail catalogs you often do a full reindex of the data in your master catalog and then run partials to account for price/availability if you don't do that in realtime using filters. Since the system of record is not the search index, Elastic is often not a good solution here.
Also, relevancy in retail is often influenced by other factors that cannot easily be implemented in Elastic. TFIDF/BM25 search is available in both platforms, but you may also weigh in other factors such as relationships with the vendor, stock on hand, or other ML techniques that are more easily implemented in SOLR.
One more point - if you can run the entire index on one machine it makes deploying and managing SOLR much easier to manage than Elastic. The complexity only grows when you have a distributed system. You can fit a lot on a big box.
Yes, it's certainly easy to manage on one system.
As the production system I work on is an academic one with few concurrent users it's possible to get away with that.
Thanks for the explanation and insight. I hadn't ever considered how different the catalog use case is from my own use cases. Makes good sense. Cheers.
I think a big reason is simply that Solr has been around a few years longer and most older sites would have been using that by the time Elasticsearch came along and never saw a good reason to go through a painful process of replacing one with the other.
These days, I would say there's very little that either product does that the other product can't do though obviously there are lots of strengths and weaknesses on both sides.
We have on prem Coveo, which is based on ES. It is/they are horrible. We pay a large amount in Enterprise support and maintenance, and it is next to nonexistent.
Thankfully we are moving to Azure Cloud Search services, which just work, over the next year.
For commodity search workloads (general retrieval/faceting) Elastic does a fine job. It scales well and there is good documentation and support.
Lucene is the core engine behind both of these solutions.
For fun, lets look at the large Enterprise acquisitions over the years:
* Verity - bought by Autonomy
* Fast - bought by Microsoft (Also known as the Enron of Norway...)
* Autonomy - bought by HP (Look at the backstory on this deal!)
* Endeca - bought by Oracle
* Vivisimo - bought by Oracle
* Google - GSA (now Google Cloud Search, hosted solution)
Next, follow the path of online acquisitions:
* IndexTank - bought by LinkedIn
* Swiftype - bought by Elastic
There's a number of interesting independent players still. Coveo plays in the Enterprise space, but it's a hard market. Algolia is doing great in the commodity online search space and seems to be growing well.
This is an area I think is open to more competition. Especially with AI/ML technologies available around Document Understanding - the Enterprise market is open for a good on-prem upstart to really take off.
Ping me offline if you have additional questions - spent almost 20 years in the space and ran a search company of my own.