Custom Open Source Search Engines Consultation & Development

Open source search engines deliver speed of innovation, scalability and cost control

Why open source search engine?

For almost a decade, we are seeing large enterprises migrating to open source search engines from proprietary solutions to power their search and analytics capabilities. Apache Lucene, SolrCloud and Elasticsearch opened the world of information retrieval to developer community, further democratizing search solutions and fueling immense community-driven innovation in the search area.
Enterprises migrating to open source search systems enjoy superb performance, scalability, cutting-edge features of engines, cutting on commercial product license costs, along with easier access to the talent and skills. Vivid community of developers and consultants working in open source space.

Experts in open source search

Grid Dynamics started in 2006 with the goal of making mission-critical systems scalable. Since then, performance and scalability engineering have been at the core of our company’s DNA. As Solr and Lucene contributors, we have a deep understanding of search engine internals, and possess years of experience tuning the performance of search systems. For over 5 years, the search solutions that we have built for our retail customers have survived Black Friday traffic storms with flying colors, without a single outage or breach of SLAs. We have helped numerous customers solve their search performance issues, improving response times, online conversion rates from search and indexing speeds, sometimes at an exponential level.

Open source search engine migration process

Phases of replatforming to open source search

Move search traffic to the new search engine

The first phase of migrating to an open source search engine is to get production search traffic onto the new search engine in the cloud without negatively affecting user experience or disrupting business KPIs. This process involves synching the catalog and other related data to the new service supporting legacy URLs for SEO reasons, and then testing the new service to ensure the relevancy is improved. Once that is done, Canary traffic is set up and monitored before diverting all production traffic to the new search engine.

Implementing merchandising tools on open source

During the next phase of the replatforming process, a merchandising tool can be implemented, allowing business users to switch from the legacy experience manager to the new tool. The reference architecture is shown above:

Adding in real-time and ML features

The last phase in migrating to open source search is to add advanced functionalities, like ML/AI, personalization, conversational search and visual search. These generally support features that are not possible in legacy systems, namely an omnichannel catalog, store-level inventory and near real-time inventory updates. These features can be implemented in the first phase of replatforming as a part of the core search engine driving immediate business value, or later in the migration process.

Benefits of replatforming to open source search

Relevant search results for shoppers

Search engines dynamically adjust to relevance in real-time based on the available catalog and inventory, directing users to the products they’re looking for.

Low risk

In our experience, search-to-cloud implementation projects can be accomplished within several months, have low risk and usually remain within a reasonable budget.

Enablement of innovative features

Replatforming from black-box platforms to open source and the cloud opens up all types of new, innovative features and technologies for search, including visual search and voice-powered search.

Accurate, up-to-date information

Shoppers no longer have to worry about browsing for a product that’s out of stock, or using a promotion that has expired. They see the inventory, pricing and promotions as they actually are, and get updates every couple minutes.

High level architecture of an open source search solution

Analytics Platform Starter Kit for GCP

Build a production-ready, modern analytics platform within weeks on Google Cloud Platform. Improve data accessibility and quality, increase speed to insights, and achieve significant ROI with our starter kit.

Analytics Platform Starter Kit for AWS

Build a production-ready, modern analytics platform within weeks on AWS cloud. Improve data accessibility and quality, increase speed to insights, and achieve significant ROI with our starter kit.

AWS Opensearch Starter Kit

We combined a decade of experience in search and product discovery solutions with AWS Opensearch platform capabilities to build a starter kit for in-house search solutions. The AWS Opensearch Starter Kit includes all the building blocks necessary to implement a modern, open source search solution that meets the needs of your business and the demands of your customers.

Insights

How to replatform e-commerce search from Endeca to Solr

In this blog post, we explain why retailers should move from Oracle Endeca to Solr, and how to do so.

Get in touch

Let's connect! How can we reach you?

First name*

Last name*

E-mail*

Phone

Invalid phone format

Job title*

Company*

What are you interested in?*

Message

I have read and accepted the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy and allow Grid Dynamics to contact me.*

Subscribe to our latest insights & events

Submitting

Thank you!

It is very important to be in touch with you.
We will get back to you soon. Have a great day!

Something went wrong...

There are possible difficulties with connection or other issues.
Please try again after some time.

Retry

Open source search engines