Google is arguably the world's largest open-source company, not only releasing a minimum of 14 million lines of open-source code but also hosting over 250,000 open-source projects on Google Code, in addition to its open-source advocacy work like Summer of Code.

Despite these open-source bona fides, it's still surprising to see Google adopting Solr, an open-source search server based on Apache Lucene, for its All for Good site.

Google is the world's search market leader by a very long stretch. Why not use its own search technology? Why use Solr?

Google's Public Sector team suggested an answer last week:

One of the top concerns we've been hearing from nonprofit organizations who list volunteer opportunities on All for Good is that their opportunities aren't updated on the site as frequently as they need. This happens because...we crawl feeds from partners like VolunteerMatch and Idealist just like Google web search crawls web pages. Crawlers don't immediately update, they take time to find new information.

Today, we're rolling out improvements to All for Good that will help solve this problem and improve search quality for users. The biggest change, which you won't see directly, is that our search engine is now powered by SOLR, an incredible open source project that will allow us to provide higher quality and more up-to-date opportunities. Nonprofits should start seeing their opportunities indexed faster, and users should see more relevant and complete results.


More: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10321751-16.html