Business Use Case Study: Migrating from Google Search Appliance to Apache Solr/Lucene Open Source Search with The Motley Fool

The Motley Fool's award-winning website, Fool.com, publishes hundreds of articles each week, with over four million unique visitors and 11 million sessions per month. They chose to replace their Google Search Appliance with Solr -- and hired Lucid Imagination to ensure successful implementation. “Lucene and Solr can definitely do what any commercial or proprietary search tool can do - certainly as well, or better, “ says Chad Wolfsheimer, VP of Technical Operations, Fool.com.

• Increased search relevancy and click-through-rate (CTR) by 40% compared to legacy search appliance; 48% reduction in web site exit rate (bounce)
• Big reduction in license subscription costs, and lower cost of ownership as content data grows
• Rapid migration from the Google Search Appliance; from working search platform within two weeks, to full production within 90 days

Search is critical to help Fool.com users find the information they need to make investment decisions. And search results quality is vital to bringing visitors back: if they find what they need, they’ll continue to return to Fool.com – for additional subscription services and paid content. The Motley Fool chose to replace their existing implementation, based on the Google Search Appliance, with Solr -- and hired Lucid Imagination to ensure successful implementation of Fool.com's mission-critical search capability.

Key Search Improvements with Solr:

• Increased search relevancy and click-through-rate (CTR) by 40% compared to legacy search appliance
• 48% reduction in web site exit rate (bounce)
• Big reduction in license subscription costs, and lower cost of ownership as content data grows
• Rapid implementation; working search platform within two weeks, full production within 90 days
• Enhanced user search productivity by adding features such as sorting on both date and relevance, spelling correction, and “Did you mean…”

Challenges

Content is core to the Motley Fool business. At Fool.com, free content is provided to users that may not know much about the Motley Fool. This provides an introduction to Motley Fool as a brand, its investing style and ideas, and options for more paid services. The content composed of roughly 75% board posts, and 25% other content items including news, blogs, reports, and videos.

“We had something basic but useable running very, very quickly. So, that was a testament to our developers, to Lucid and to Solr, itself. We were very, very happy with that. “
- Chad Wolfsheimer, VP of Technical Operations, Fool.com