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What Great Search Looks Like (and How to Build it Fast)

· 7 min read
Wes Richardet
Wes Richardet
Lucenia Team

In our data driven world, having great search capabilities is crucial for a positive user experience and smooth operations. We've all had frustrating experiences with search results in our daily lives. Either the results aren't what we need, loading times take forever, or we can't find what we're looking for in large datasets. It can be a real headache! This raises the question, what does "great search" really look like? It's more than just fast benchmarks and keyword matching. Great search is intelligent, lightning fast, cost effective and secure by default all while integrating with your existing infrastructure. Building this doesn't have to be a slow and cumbersome process. Lucenia delivers an AI Search Engine for private clouds and enables you to build and deploy superior search capabilities with remarkable speed.

Great search isn't a single feature, it's a combination of capabilities designed for modern enterprise. Let's take a detailed look at these search foundations.

At the forefront of great search is contextual awareness. This means moving beyond static keyword lookups to dynamic context-aware information retrieval. Lucenia embraces this approach by being an AI Search Engine that brings a new vision for contextual AI and analytics.

AI Observability​

True intelligence begins with understanding your data. Lucenia, when paired with FluentBit, transforms raw logs into retrievable context; a crucial step for AI Observability and DevOps environments. This means your search can tap into the deep operational insights hidden within your data.

AI Powered Search with Bring Your Own Model​

Great search leverages cutting edge AI. Lucenia introduced AI-Native search with RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) and BYOM (Bring Your Own Model). This enables a more sophisticated, human-like understanding of queries and generates relevant answers, even allowing you to utilize your own specialized AI models.

Lucenia version 0.4.0 brought significant enhancements to vector search. Vector search is crucial for understanding semantic meaning of queries, enabling more relevant results even when exact keywords aren't present.

Geospatial Intelligence​

For many industries, location is not just a field in your metadata, it's fundamental to understanding context. Lucenia is geospatially superior to other search engines and uses that location advantage to enhance search AI. High precision, dynamic coordinate reference system support, and geospatially aware AI-powered search delivers accurate real-time insights across various industries.

Performance and Reliability​

Speed and dependability are non-negotiable for great search. Users expect instant results and any downtime can severely impact operations.

Optimized Resource Utilization​

Lucenia's 43% average savings on search is achieved through a number of ways. Dynamic fields provide increased flexibility to allow field definitions to be changed on the fly instead of setting once on data ingest. Lucenia also offers enhanced compression techniques for stored fields, remote backed indexes on cloud storage, and the ability to search files in your data lake.

Dynamic Autoscaling & Mixed Clusters​

Lucenia supports traditional deployment methods and mixed cluster support with Elasticsearch and OpenSearch. Many search clusters are set up to only grow in the number of nodes. This type of deployment model will eventually collapse under its own weight. Lucenia stands out by targeting scaling down search infrastructure to prevent ever growing costs.

Cost Efficiency and Resource Optimization​

Traditional search infrastructure can be notoriously expensive due to storage, compute, and third-party application costs. Great search actively works to reduce this burden.

Substantial Cost Savings​

Lucenia provides the ability to reduce search costs associated with storage, compute, and maintenance costs. It delivers on average 43% cost savings on search and 0.5.0 delivered 80% lower cost vector storage. These are dramatic reductions to an enterprise's bottom line.

Efficient Resource Provisioning​

Instead of over-provisioning, Lucenia allows you to provision only the resources you need. This precise allocation prevents wasteful spending on idle computing resources.

Uncovering Costly Inefficiencies​

Lucenia offers a control panel for search operations that helps you unify your search operations to uncover and fix expensive problems such as unnecessary data replication, inefficient storage and retrieval, and overcomplicated query processing. This proactive approach to optimization is crucial for achieving long-term cost control.

Robust Security, Data Privacy, and Customer Control​

Great search prioritizes security and gives organizations control over their data.

Lucenia delivers secure, AI-native search, ensuring that advanced search capabilities don't come at the expense of data protection. Every build of Lucenia ships with security enabled by default so your data is protected from the start.

Privacy​

Privacy is non-negotiable in AI search and Lucenia is built to get that detail right. As we develop Lucenia for the future, we continue to account for a security and privacy first approach. Other search solutions may tease features by turning security off, but Lucenia makes no concessions around securing your data.

Complex Data Management​

Enterprise search, by its nature, manages complex and secure data across multiple sources. Lucenia Security supports Role Based Access Control and Attribute Based Access Control. This allows you to intersect role based security with data attributes and provides you the granularity to secure your data.

Hybrid Approach​

Many Lucenia customers adopt a hybrid architecture by combining on-prem, private cloud, and public clouds. This gives companies a cost effective solution to participate in digital transformation and maintains flexibility for the business. Users can avoid getting locked into one cloud provider and more quickly adapt to the changing landscape of their corporate objectives.

How to Build Great Search, Fast - with Lucenia​

The beauty of Lucenia is that it doesn't define what great search looks like; it provides the means to build it quickly and efficiently, based on how you define "great". As The Retrieval Engine for Contextual AI, Lucenia is uniquely positioned to accelerate your journey to superior search performance. Our goal is to continue to be the easiest search and retrieval engine to onboard.

Lucenia's focus on optimizing resource usage and delivering significant cost savings means that your investment quickly yields, making the "build it fast" proposition not just about deployment speed but also about rapidly realizing that value. Your development team can get it running locally in under 2 minutes on their laptop and start to compress vector data, read Parquet files, query geospatial data, and load your own AI models. Lucenia's design philosophy is AI native, high performance, cost efficient, secure, and compatible with emerging data architectures. Organizations can leapfrog traditional search limitations and implement truly great search capabilities, quickly and sustainably.

Great search capabilities are essential rather than a luxury. They require smart solutions that are quick, cost-effective, secure, and seamlessly integrated. Lucenia makes this possible by turning raw unstructured data into useful insights with an AI search engine that is geospatially superior, flexible with vector data, and significantly reduces your costs. By choosing Lucenia, you are boosting your overall operational efficiency and helping your team find what they need quickly and effortlessly.

Get Started Today​

Lucenia 0.6.1 is available now. Download it here and start building secure, retrieval-native AI infrastructure—faster than ever.