Eighteen-month-old Lucid Imagination rose above the covering ground fog Tuesday to announce its existence as the first open source company to commercially support the Apache Lucene and Solr search technologies.

The Java-based Lucene search library is one of the top 15 open source projects in the world and one of top five Apache projects with installations at 4,000 companies. Downloads of Lucene and the Solr server that makes Lucene into a search platform for building search applications are currently running at the rate of 6,000 a day, a built-in marketplace that may explain how the start-up and its collection of key Lucene players managed to pick up a $6 million check from a couple of VCs in the bleak month of September last year.

It's playing in a market space with 2007 revenues of $1.8 billion, according to IDC, that's growing at 28% a year.

CEO Eric Gries, previously with Xacct Software and Compuware, observes that the company stands at the "intersection of two high-growth trends - open source software and search."

It's also got to watch its back considering its competitors include the Google Appliance, Microsoft with its Fast acquisition, Endeca and Autonomy - which just bought content management vendor Interwoven last week for the heady sum of $775 million, upsetting in the process the usual formula of content management companies being the acquirer.

Lucid of course presents itself as an alternative to pricey proprietary solutions.

So far it's reportedly picked up about 20 customers such as Apple, AOL, Comcast, Ticketmaster and Netflix. FedEx and MySpace, among other high-profile firms, use Lucene but are still be wooed to Lucid.

The company is offering certified distributions of Lucene and Solr, commercial-grade support, training and consulting. And its web site is set up to function as a knowledge portal.

Gries says search widgetry requires constant care; a corrupt index can trash its performance and accuracy. Lucid's value-added software covers installation, enhanced scalability, tuning and system monitoring and it expects future growth to come from additional value-added software extensions.

It's offering both the Apache version of Lucene and its certified version for free; support subscriptions are available for both at the same price. All core enhancements will be contributed back to the project, the company says.

The Lucid entourage includes Doug Cutting, the creator of Lucene, who is head of the company's technical advisory board, as well as key committers and co-founders Erik Hatcher, Grant Ingersoll and Solr developer Yonik Seeley.

The company's A round came equally from Granite Ventures and Walden International. The money is earmarked for expanding Lucid's technical team as well as for growing sales and marketing.