HP Autonomy Intelligent Universal Search (discontinued) vs. Lucidworks Platform

It does a decent job at its core functions (that other free software does just as well or better).

Very well suited for out of the box enterprise search applications.

• It adheres to traditional Microsoft standards such as: fact-dump documentation with no coherent story or 'best practices' information, inability to automate common tasks, intentional obfuscation of its basic operations.
• It provides OK search results. Not great, but OK.

• Signals feature to boost search results helps search relevancy
• Business Rules feature for tuning search results
• Query pipeline design gives great flexibility in application development

• There are about a dozen different config files to maintain, and the most important one is dynamically modified by Autonomy itself while it runs. Which means that it is impossible to automate the configuration or keep the configs in versioned source control. Even `cp *.cfg ~/cfgbak/` won't help you roll back a change, because it is never safe to restore a previous config. You'll be using `diff new.cfg old.cfg` a lot.
• The Linux port is poorly thought out. The binaries are named *.exe. The StartService.sh scripts contain both `echo 'Are you sure you want to start the service? Hit ctrl-C to cancel''; read dummy` and, I kid you not, a `chmod a+x /path/to/my/binary.exe`.
• Many features are poorly documented, leading to lots of back and forth with the support department just to answer basic questions like "what does this error code in my logs signify?"
• It seems to reinvent the wheel, poorly, everywhere. E.g. the scheduled backup feature rolls through a user-defined finite list of directories in which to store backups. On day 0 it uses directory 0, on day 1 it uses directory 1, and after day N it rolls back and overwrites directory 0. Why would this be preferable to using a single directory and naming zip files based on the current timestamp?

• Documentation can be improved

Management wants to see ROI on the (hefty) cost of purchasing this software, and has mandated that we continue using it. We would prefer to switch immediately.

It is incredibly intuitive and so easy to use that business people can now complete functions that used to be limited to software developers only.

It has continued to improve over the years.

IDOL seems to be a blackbox solution. Fusion is much more flexible with more features and options for developers to choose from.

• I have learned to tack a zero onto the end of any estimate I make for how long an Autonomy change will take in both planning and implementation.

• Allowed us to move software developers from enterprise search to other customer focused applications due to built in signals processing and related popularity boosting out of the box.
• Enabled business experts to work directly with Fusion to influence search results and not be so dependent on developers.