Re:Search Community Survey

["Andrey Ukhanov (BLOOMBERG/ 919 3RD A)" <au...@bloomberg.net>]

Thank you everyone for completing the survey! You can find this year's results in this GDoc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qK3Zkm_T1c_aewrjL3N1k0EqmvA-gl3CdFcpuB0XT0I/edit?usp=sharing

Feel free to comment there if you have any suggestions for the 2026 version!

TL;DR:

Frequently used features

Mostly relevance-related (e.g. vector search, re-ranking), some naturally with operations (e.g. collect metrics), with two other stand-outs:

 - Admin UI. Solr has this as an entry-point, but users of other search techs also use equivalent UIs.
 - Nested documents and joins. Almost half of the respondents need to define relations between documents.

Deployment

Most people run small-scale, multi-node setups, but there are a lot of organizations with large scale (e.g. 50+ nodes) and a big chunk (1/3) are using Kubernetes. Correlates with improvements areas, where many users selected "scalability & performance".

Improvement areas

"AI & Semantic search" is the first one by far, followed by the related topic of "relevance tuning". Usability-related topics were also selected a lot, including config complexity, documentation and visualization tools.

Participation

Many people want to get involved, and it looks like the main barriers are funding and ease of contribution. Which are somewhat correlated: if it's easier to contribute, less funding is needed to do so.

Sample biases

 - Role and company. Mostly engineers, many from large organizations.
 - Use-case. Mostly "pure search" like E-commerce, Enterprise search.
 - Search engine. Solr is best represented, Elasticsearch, OpenSearch have good response rates, and we have decent signal for standalone Lucene and Vespa.

From: users@solr.apache.org At: 06/10/25 12:36:15 UTC-4:00To:  users@solr.apache.org
Subject: Search Community Survey

In collaboration with the Apache Solr PMC, we are conducting a short Search 
Community Survey to learn more about how search technologies are used in 
today's quickly evolving landscape. 

It only takes a few minutes, and your insights will help shape the future of 
search. Please feel free to forward this to others working in this space!

Take the survey now: https://forms.gle/nvg6DXV7Robjms7QA

Thanks for contributing to a better search community! We look forward to 
sharing aggregated results and having further discussions with everyone next 
week at Berlin Buzzwords!