In 2008, I was asked to take over leadership of CareerBuilder’s search technology team. We were using the Microsoft FAST search platform at the time, but realized that search was too important to the success of our business for us to continue relying on a commercial vendor instead of developing the domain expertise internally. I immediately began investigating open source alternatives such as Solr, which seemed to provide most of the key features needed for our products. By the summer of 2009, we decided that we were ready to bring our search expertise in-house and convert our systems to Solr.
The timing was great. Lucene, the open source search library upon which Solr is built, had become a full top-level Apache project in February 2005, and Solr, which had been contributed to the Apache Software Foundation in 2006, had become a top-level Apache project in January of 2007. Both technologies were reaching critical mass and would soon be merged (in March 2010) into a unified project.
By the summer of 2010, our entire platform was converted to Solr. In the process, we increased the speed of our searches, significantly reduced the number of servers necessary to support our search infrastructure, dropped expensive licensing fees, increased platform stability, and in-sourced much of the search expertise for which we had previously been dependent on a commercial vendor.