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Cloudant will announce today a new product that brings Apache Lucene's search capabilities to BigCouch, Cloudant's version of Apache CouchDB. Typically, to search BigCouch or CouchDB you need to write map-reduce queries in JavaScript. Cloudant Search will bring Lucene's front-end features such as its Google-like query language and its analyzers to create a more usable way to explore data contained the BigCouch document database.

After the collapse of the economy two years ago, a market force took effect that has led to the "cratering," of a small but telling sector of the enterprise search market.

The story demonstrates how open-source technologies are now more than alternatives for enterprise search. They are the norm.

Lucid Imagination launched LucidWorks Enterprise today, a search technology with an API as part of its core.

The move is testament to the new world of the enterprise, where platforms are an attractive option for building applications that leverage the Web and multiple forms of structured and and unstructured data. It's a world where a search app has to be simple to build and flexible enough to connect people to the right information, be it internal documents or social data from the distributed Web.

At its core, LucidWork Enterprise is built on the Apache Solr/Lucene platform. Layered into the thinking it is a realization that content is changing in multiple dimensions. In terms of volume, content is coming in at a new pace. Twitter is testament to the speed in which data is now flowing.

The concept of video in the enterprise is not new. But the inherent problem has always been about its usefulness more than anything else.

Video can be monolithic, passive and painful to watch if executed poorly. But in context, video can be immensely valuable. A video that a mechanic can watch while fixing a car is valuable. An hour-long video interview of a product manager can be painful.

Fujitsu has integrated MindTouch technology into its scanner technology. The service means that people can feed documents through a Fujitsu scanner and then automatically post them to the MindTouch cloud-based collaboration service. Documents will be uploaded, stored, shared and processed into a web-oriented environment.

It's the cloud factor that makes this interesting. Scanning documents into a cloud-based environment has a number of implications for markets that still rely on antiquated storage practices. For example, this is the kind of application that would seem to be applicable for law firms that now use warehouses to store millions of paper documents.

Open-source search has some major advantages compared to its competitors.

First of all, it's free. Second, it stands up in comparison to the largest, proprietary search vendors. Third, there is a growing ecosystem around open-source search that makes it far easier to implement than ever before.

By building structure around a glut of data from U.S. Customs, Panjiva has become a clearing house for the information on suppliers that enterprises crave. Now, searching customs data may not be the life of excitement and adventure you envisioned, but Panjiva doesn't just have valuable data for the enterprise.

Launched in 2006 without much fanfare, Panjiva has acquired some traction. With the state of the economy, news orgs like BusinessWeek and The Wall Street Journal have turned to it as a bellwether for the health of global trade.

The number of documents produced in the enterprise grows at a breakneck pace, and enterprise search functionality has to scale fast in order to keep up. The latest incarnation of the Google Search Appliance, the GSA 6.0, launched today and can now index billions of documents to do just that.

The impressive new scaling ability is in part due to the ability to connect a near-limitless number of the yellow GSA boxes across different deployments regardless of location. But shiny new hardware plays a role too. Based on Dell servers and powered by Xeon 5500 Series processors from Intel, the high-end model can index up to 30 million documents, versus 10 million in the prior model.

Microsoft announced a $1.2 billion takeover offer for Norwegian enterprise search company Fast Search and Transfer. FAST's board of directors unanimously recommended that shareholders approve the deal, and 37% of the shareholders -- including the company's two largest institutional investors -- have already irrevocably accepted the offer.