Apache Lucene is an open source and free text search engine library written in Java. It is a technology suitable for applications that requires full-text search, and is available cross-platform.
$0
per month
IBM Watson Discovery
Score 9.1 out of 10
N/A
IBM offers Watson Discovery, a natural language processing (NLP) application with options to measure sentiment, detect entities, semantic roles, and other concepts.
Apache Lucene is a perfect text search implementation where the heap space usage needs to be kept to its minimal. It also enables search based on various search fields and most importantly the search and index process can happen simultaneously. The only scenario where it might be less appropriate would be when the index size grows too big. We have witnessed few scalable issues where the search would take a while when the index size is too large.
Overall, IBM Watson Discovery is an amazing technology that we use with our clients to address various business problems, but the biggest challenge has always been about ingesting, analyzing, enriching, and searching huge collections of documents and allowing our end users and SMEs to be able to search for what they need to reduce the time and efforts spent daily on a manual search through various collections of documents. We have successfully managed to reduce manual work by over 80%, and now our SMEs are being used for the skills they have to gather insights rather than do manual work.
We found Apache Lucene to be extremely performant in querying large amounts of data and retrieving the correct files based on the metadata provided.
The online community offers great support for the product. Even though it is an open source tool, it is not difficult to find help online for it.
When we were creating a proof of concept application, we found that the software worked just as well, while being run locally on a resource-limited PC.
Specific queries on document lists often return the complete list instead of the required ones.
When several components are combined in a pipeline they are invoked by the pipeline's run method therefore, executing multiple calls within a pipeline results in a nested stacktrace which complicates the debugging process.
Product has a steep learning curve & requires a lot of trainings.
Similar to all IBM Watson and Salesforce product solutions, the overall support would be a 10/10. Their provided FAQ's help with frequently experienced issues and if still unable to figure something out, their customer service representatives are always super responsive. With instant chat functions available, it is easy to ask a quick question rather than sitting on hold.
The search and index performance of [Apache] Lucene is excellent and the quality of results is good, if not better. For implementing it with small scale applications it is a no brainer, Lucene is the best and most cost effective solution. Learning curve is not too steep either.
Discovery differs from its competitors due to the better ease of implementation and the high level of natural language recognition, it is equal in integration resources such as API and workflow or process pipeline, but it loses in the price for a high volume of documents and/or research. If you own or plan to use other services from the IBM Watson family, there is no doubt that Watson discovery is your best option. Another important point is if you plan to use a cloud or on-premise service (local server or private cloud).
Being an open source project we did not have to pay any licensing fees for using Apache Lucene. It has greatly improved our search functionality in our web apps.
