Fess

Fess is an open source enterprise search server that indexes an organization's own content and serves it through a ready made search interface. Crawler, indexer, administration console and search UI are bundled together, so a working full text search environment is configured rather than built. It runs anywhere a Java or Docker runtime is available and stores its index in OpenSearch. It fits teams that need searchable access to scattered internal content without commissioning a search application. Crawlers cover web sites, file systems, Windows shared folders, databases and cloud storage, extracting text from HTML, PDF and Office documents, with support for external extraction such as OCR. Access control is treated as a first class concern: it can search sites behind BASIC, DIGEST, NTLM and form authentication, supports single sign on through Active Directory and SAML, and varies results by login status. The search experience includes facets and drill down, labels for classifying results, auto complete and suggestions, highlighting, cached and thumbnail views, responsive layouts for phones, and JSON output plus a JavaScript widget for embedding search in an existing site. Administrators configure crawl targets, edit the search screens, maintain user and synonym dictionaries and review search and click logs from the browser. Fess is provided under the Apache License at no cost, and the project publishes no license fees or paid editions. The maintainers offer commercial support through a separate contact route, with terms and prices not published on the site. The product is maintained by a Japanese open source group, and the site and documentation are available in several languages including English, Japanese, German, Spanish, French, Chinese and Korean.