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January 25, 2017

Lucidworks Updates Search App Dev Platform

(Sergey Nivens/Shutterstock)

An upgraded application development platform released this week is intended to speed the roll out of new search applications designed to index data while scaling to billions of documents.

San Francsico-based Lucidworks said Wednesday (Jan. 25) its Fusion 3 platform adds features such as query simulation capabilities and an improved user interface. The intent is to allow users to scale the app development platform to millions of searches.

The upgrade responds to growing demands inside companies for Google-like search capabilities by providing application developers with an upgraded tool for building new applications that can “accurately retrieve information without draining limited IT resources,” Lucidworks CEO Will Hayes explained.

The updated platform includes a streamlined setup process designed to speed the process of accessing data sets to deploying working search applications. It also includes index and query “workbenches,” the former to help manage and organize ETL processes, the latter for automating the process of scoring for search relevance. The company added that the query feature would help tune search results to boost relevance, and then test changes before going to production.

The query workbench also is designed to allow developers to adjust relevancy of signals and add different parameters to determine the optimal setting before building more permanent applications. The company said the Fusion upgrade provides improved connectors to integrate data using new parsers to improve relevancy.

The upgraded platform also includes an object import/export feature that introduces the ability to share a Fusion app or configuration. Configurations also can be replicated from development through production, the company said. Other objects such as pipeline setups and aggregation settings also can be shared.

The platform vendor noted that new search apps often bring with them the requirement to learn an entire new set of commands in order to access data. The upgraded platform allows users to query an index using familiar SQL commands.

The Fusion search app development platform was initially released in 2014 and upgraded in July 2015. The original platform represented an advance by incorporating advanced signal processing and analytics to drive a new level of personalization and push-delivery of information to users.

Lucidworks’ flagship platform works as a standalone search platform as well as an extension of existing implementations of Apache Solr, the open source enterprise search platform. The startup’s View user interface module serves as an extension of its Solr-based Fusion app development platform.

Investors in the nearly three-year-old search analytics startup include Shasta Ventures, Granite Ventures, and Walden International.

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