The DB-Engines ranking includes now search engines

von Paul Andlinger, 4. Februar 2013
Tags: Amazon CloudSearch, Compass, Elasticsearch, Search engines, Solr, Sphinx

Starting with the February data, we include search engines as new category in our DB-Engines ranking.

Search engines, sometimes called enterprise search engines, are specialized database management systems for retrieving information from a data set.

In addition to standard text search as provided also by other DBMS, search engines offer features such as advanced ranking and grouping of search results, linguistic processing such as word stemming and lemmatization, and specific search-related findings such as "did you mean" proposals.

This is the current popularity ranking of search engines:

Rank	Search Engine	Score
1.	Solr	47.35
2.	Sphinx	8.85
3.	Elasticsearch	7.40
4.	Xapian	0.36
5.	Compass	0.23
6.	CloudSearch	0.08

Apache Solr is by far the most popular search engine in our list. It is implemented in Java and based on the Lucene library. Solr holds a quite impressive rank 10 in the overall DB-Engines Ranking.

Sphinx is second amongst the search engines, having already a much lower score. Sphinx is also an open source product, written in C++.

Next comes Elasticsearch, also based on Lucene and thus a direct competitor to Solr. Xapian is again based on C++, whereas Compass can be seen as predecessor of Elasticsearch, as its main developer Shay Banon moved on to concentrate on this newer project. CloudSearch is an interesting new development, a hosted search solution provided by Amazon and currently in Beta.

Search engines are certainly niche products in the database area. However, the good scores in our ranking shows, that this niche is actually quite significant.

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