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What are the options when it comes to SaaS/hosted full text search? How should I evaluate the different options available?

I'm looking for something that uses Lucene, solr, or sphinx on the backend, and provides a REST API for submitting documents to index, and running searches.

I could build my own EC2 AMI, but I'd have to configure EBS and other stuff, monitor it, etc.

Joel Spolsky
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James Cooper
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  • keep in mind a hosted solr environment will always be slower than a dedicated server. depending on the size of your index you may want to keep note of this. – recursive9 Oct 28 '10 at 18:27
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    (Note: I have edited this question to make it less of a shopping list question, so it can be reopened... it's just too useful to close.) – Joel Spolsky Nov 18 '11 at 16:31
  • @Flexo: why is this protected? I don't see how it qualifies. – Mauricio Scheffer Jul 09 '12 at 19:37
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    @MauricioScheffer - there's a lot of deleted "answers" from low rep (<10) users - it's quite the spam magnet. 8662224 was the one that I spotted, combined with the rest made it a good candidate for protecting in my view. – Flexo Jul 09 '12 at 19:41

6 Answers6

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Websolr provides a cloud-based Solr with a control panel. It's in private beta as of this writing, but you can get the service through Heroku.

Another hosted Solr service is PowCloud, also in private beta, which seems to offer strong Wordpress integration.

SolrHQ: another beta service providing a hosted Solr solution, with Joomla and Wordpress integrations.

Acquia Search offers Solr integration for Drupal sites.

If you decide to build your own EC2 instance, the SolrOnAmazonEC2 wiki page might be useful. Or you could just get LucidWorks Solr for EC2, which is probably the easiest and fastest way to get Solr on EC2.

Engine Yard provides a cloud-based Sphinx service.

Mauricio Scheffer
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Indextank is a hosted real-time full text search solution. It's pretty simple to set up (you can get an index running in a couple of minutes) and it's very powerfull (Reddit runs over IndexTank). It provides Java, Python, Ruby and Php clients as well as a Rest API specification. There's an awesome support service (including live chat). You should give it a try.

Leandro
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    IndexTank was recently bought by LinkedIn, and I believe their end-user search service will be going away... Very sad. – Ian Nov 01 '11 at 17:54
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    Hi I am founder of http://IndexDen.com - our API is 100% compatible with IndexTank's API. If you are IndexTank user and looking for replacement or looking for SaaS hosted search then please try out our service! – Iaroslav Vorozhko Apr 06 '12 at 09:23
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My five cents
http://indexisto.com/
Offers free hosted Elastic Search if you are ready for advertisement in search results. But anyway you can start with free, and switch to no ads paid account.

It's also not just hosted Elastic Search, but ready to ase Ajax search box (that really impress) to embed to you site (mobile and tablet adopted), and some useful features like statistics, image resizing. There are several options to fill the index with documents - crawler, API and DB connector

Andrey Uglev
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Another option, particularly for UK people is http://www.netaphorsearch.com/ . I should point out I own Netaphor Ltd. We support the Solr REST API but also have a PHP connector so that you can get up and running very quickly.

Richard Still
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Have a look at Artirix - UK company but also in the US http://www.artirix.com. I know they power some sites such as Globrix.com in the UK based on SOLR and have a bunch of other products for crawling and data processing

Ian
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Another option for lower-volume websites is Midwestern Mac's hosted Solr search (I am the owner of Midwestern Mac, LLC, just fyi).

Although it's not too hard (if you can use a command line respectably well) to provision your own server on a VPS somewhere...

geerlingguy
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    No doubt about that - monitoring is another issue I have to contend with. Right now the tools for monitoring solr search are far and few between... mostly I just have a few handmade shell scripts that parse log files. – geerlingguy Jan 03 '11 at 16:38