I'm evaluating indexers for a (potentially as always) important project, played with SOLR quite a bit in the last few days and I like what I see a lot.

SOLR makes it really easy to build powerful indexing services with simple HTTP/XML interfaces (yes, it's an SOA indexer if your like), it's very flexible and tends to do the right thing out of the box. I've had a few minor issues to get French-language documents to index properly, but nothing major. And it's fast.

Also, the code is readable enough to allow you to find out precisely what it's doing with your data, should you need to. But you already know that I like open source tools...

Anyway, to be fair we'd like to compare SOLR's toolkit approach with an out-of-the-box solution like Google Mini, which might be easier in terms of administration.

I haven't found much detailed info on the mini's product pages, on the features page they list things like increased number of requests per second which is...well..not really a feature I guess. If it wasn't Google, I think that page would make me dismiss the product immediately, it smells so much of salesmen in dark suits...

So, dear Layzweb: if anyone has experiences to share about Google Mini, hit the comments button! Does it do things like precise range-of-dates searches, semi-complex boolean expressions and the like? Has anyone compared it against SOLR or another Lucene-based solution?

I'll post my results here if I get to evaluate it, but for this one has to buy it and take advantage of the 30-days right to return it, which means some paperwork to arrange on my customer's side.