DollarDays International, one of the biggest online wholesalers of various goods, has recently revealed their tremendous success during the back-to-school season. It reported its huge milestone together with EasyAsk, a company that offers natural language semantic technology to increase the speed and efficiency at which people find information.

DollarDays originally used Solr to power its website’s search function, but shifted to EasyAsk. The press release “DollarDays Delivers a Solid Back-to-School Season with EasyAsk Semantic Search” tells us what DollarDays CEO Marc Joseph thought about the upgrade:

‘EasyAsk search dramatically reduced the time for customers to find products and get to that all important checkout stage,’ said Joseph.  ‘As our number of items and seasonal merchandising needs grew, EasyAsk’s superior faceted search enabled our shoppers to more explicitly explore items across multiple dimensions.  We offer a number of niche products, and once the visitors get to our site, we need to make it easy to find the exact product they want.  EasyAsk helps us do that.’

After their switch from Endeca to Solr, DollarDays mentioned that they wish to stick to open source as much as possible so that they could avoid vendor lock-in and so they could check the source code and make their own modifications as needed. But they have turned around and reverted back to their original search strategy with proprietary software.

Probably one of the problems that DollarDays encountered has to do with the implementation of Solr. Solr is an open source search technology that is definitely one of the most powerful around yet, of course, it requires technical skills. DollarDays may have been better served with LucidWorks Search a company ready to offer robust  solutions to  managing open source resources. By doing so, they can leverage the power of Lucene/Solr minus the technical hassle.

Lauren Llamanzares, September 28, 2012

Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext.