Lucid Imagination

The company offers various software and solutions to organizations across a wide range of sectors, including e-commerce, Web 2.0, media, telecommunications, government and research looking to gain the full benefits from the free open source search platforms. Which, based on the company’s website, seems to be in high demand. Downloads of the platforms have increased nearly 10 times over the past three years, reaching rates of 7,000 downloads per day.

Lucene, a free text-based search engine library built entirely in Java, allows developers to create quick and easy search access to an enterprise’s content across multiple platforms. While Solr, a ready-to-use search platform that works on top of the Lucene library, lets developers integrate search and navigation features. Apache Lucene/Solr offers an attractive alternative to the proprietary licensed search and discovery software vendors, according to the company’s website.

Lucid Imagination also recently announced the one-year anniversary of its official launch claiming sales in the millions and over 50 customers, including AT&T, Nike, Sears, Ford, Verizon, The Guardian, Elsevier, The Motley Fool, Cisco, Macy’s and Zappos.

The San Mateo, California company, founded in 2007, previously secured a first round of funding for $6 million.  The second round held a new investment from Shasta Ventures and first round investors Granite Ventures and Walden International.

The project is secretive, but has a preliminary launch date of the first quarter of 2007, the Times of London reports.

Wales says Google’s flaws have become more apparent:

Google is very good at many types of search, but in many instances it produces nothing but spam and useless crap. Try searching for the term ‘Tampa hotels’, for example, and you will not get any useful results…

Of course, Wikipedia’s reliance more than a thousand of human administrators has its own problems, such as human bias, so there will be no perfect fix. And there are plenty of other so-called social search engines that have already launched with varying strategies. VentureBeat recently reported on Yoono and Collarity, for example. There are ton of others. Just look at the Firefox recommended add-ons; about half of them have some sort of social search feature. And Yahoo could do a lot more with its social features (Delicious, Flickr and others), as Fred Wilson notes.

The idea is to have humans lend a hand in judging what sites should appear in search results. Google relies on computers, used to count things like the number of links a site has — and spammers are taking advantage of it. Among open-source, user-generated sites, Wikipedia has been among the more successful (it has more than 1.5 million articles, and despite its flaws and plenty of critiques, the site has gained a certain credibility). However, it is unclear how Wales’ other site, Wikia, is performing. Unlike Wikipedia, Wikia is for-profit, and it’s not certain how much user loyalty can be generated for such a site.

Wikia recently received a cash infusion from Amazon to help build out its features, as VentureBeat first reported here.

According to the Times, the search project has been dubbed Wikiasari — a combination of wiki, the Hawaiian word for quick, and asari, which is Japanese for “rummaging search”.

The project will reportedly be built on open source search platforms Nutch and Lucene. Techcrunch has more details here.