Yonik Seeley

I’m an engineer, open source enthusiast, and the creator of Apache Solr and Luxir.

Luxir is what I’m working on now. It’s a new open source search engine written in C++, with full-text search, vector search, faceting, and analytics in one engine. It’s a clean-slate design with twenty years of Lucene and Solr hindsight behind it, built for the most search per core, per gigabyte, and per dollar. Introducing Luxir has the story.

I wrote the first version of Solr in 2004 at CNET. Solr is an open source search and analytics server built on Apache Lucene, known for features like faceted search (those category counts you see on shopping sites), real-time analytics, and highly scalable distributed search. In 2014 I created the Heliosearch fork of Solr, whose faceting work went back into Solr as the JSON Facet API.

I’m also a co-founder of Lucidworks, an Apache Lucene committer and PMC member, an Apache Software Foundation member, and author of various other little things such as Noggit, the streaming JSON parser used in Solr.