On the Liip blog today there's a new post from David Buchmann looking at why a client of theirs moved away from a Google Search Appliance and towards Zend_Lucene for their searching needs.

Google technology does a good job when searching the wild and treacherous realms of the public internet. However, the commercial Google Search Appliance (GSA) sold for searching intranet websites did not convince me at all. For a client, we first had to integrate the GSA, later we reimplemented search with Zend_Lucene. Some thoughts comparing the two search solutions.

They replaced a search appliance with Lucene for a few reasons, some of which the GSA weren't doing very well: access protection, language detection and filtering by meta data. He describes the Lucene system that replaced it - separate processes for each website, checks on only changed documents, plain-text conversion and backups of the Lucene indexes, just in case. It's definitely a more flexible solution, though the initial indexing still takes a while. He also includes a small snippet of code showing how to read in binary files as plain text.

A different sort of abstraction layer project has been started up and has already seen a few releases - Forage. As mentioned on Rob Young's blog:

Recently I've been working on a search abstraction library for PHP called Forage. The idea is to bring to search what we've had for relational databases for quite a while, abstraction.

On Friday I put up a preview release with three backends; Solr, Xapian and Zend Search Lucene. At the moment it has the bare minimum of features but there will be more soon. In this post I'm going to talk a little about the motivation for the project and then walk through a short example.

He talks about the need for search abstraction (integration and resilience to change) before getting into an example of some code that grabs the data from an RSS feed, passes it in to the Xapian search engine and stores it before looking it over for thier search terms ("yahoo microsoft").

You can download the library if you'd like to try it out for yourself.