Apache Lucene vs. Luigi's Box vs. Visual Search

Apache Lucene offers great full-text search library that makes it easy to add search functionality to a website or other applications. Lucene is ideal if you want low-level access to the indexes and its APIs. For general purposes, Apache Solr, the web application built atop of Lucene can be used instead. Apache Solr comes with caching, HTTP/ JSON APIs and a simple web administration console.

Incentivized

Luigi's Box is the perfect solution for sales platforms that have search engine problems on their site. Luigi's Box allows you to go to the next level and enable customers to find what they are looking for. With additional options to recommend and indicate substitutes and add-on products, it can work great as a sales-boosting element.

• Fast indexing, with proper optimization I can index a Gig of data in 2 mins.
• Easy integration with web crawlers
• Quick and Accurate Results
• Flexible sorting option for results based on the search field and relevance

Incentivized

• Wide access to the analysis panel that supports sales and helps analyze user behavior.
• Adapting functionality to the partner's needs, which confirms the flexibility of the tool.
• The boost function which allows us to prioritise showing customers certain products over others, which improves conversions.

Incentivized

• We had difficulty porting the project to a cluster based environment on the cloud.
• For our particular use case of retrieving documents based on text pattern matching, the program worked efficiently however, we did not find many resources for image pattern recognition based on their metadata.

Incentivized

• More choice for customisation and layout would be good.
• More payment options for example the choice to pay via direct debit.

Luigi's Box just slots in nicely to the website with very little code and has no negative impact on pagespeed scores. Having been using it for a number of months now, we have had no bugs or downtime. The search functionality works for every customer and even our staff use it every day to get to the product they want faster.

Incentivized

Their support is excellent. Quick and helpful.

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.

Incentivized

In my opinion, Luigi's Box is superior. It was much easier to implement, customer service was better, the search results are much more accurate, the customization options are much more advanced, the analytics section is superior and the price for all of the tools that Luigi's Box has to offer is extremely reasonable. We did also try to build our own product in house, but this proved very difficult and complicated to get the results we wanted.

• Very good at using minimal hardware sets saving money on hosting.
• Very good at housing multiple cores or instances.

Incentivized

• Reduction in the number of abandoned carts - since the launch of the service, we have seen a drop in cart abandonment by more than 10%
• Lower reports of product search problems from customers
• Analytical accounts - they were able to recommend many things to us and improve services