Back in January we rebooted our search implementation, replacing it with Lucene.Net. We've been quite happy with the results, which are faster, more relevant, and ... perhaps not Google quality, but certainly getting closer to the realm of Googlesque.
We are also big fans of the Lucene.Net project, which has had some rocky times of late. I asked the core contributors to the Lucene.Net project what we could do to help, and Troy Howard came up with something interesting:
We'd love to take advantage of your offer for help. I've been trying to think of the most awesome thing that Stack Overflow could do for us, and I think I've finally found it. I've been following Jeff's blog for a long time, and I recall very well his initial posts on stackoverflow.com in 2008 and the logo design contest. This was repeated with the serverfault and superuser ... You guys are awesome at this. Your logos look great. The process is fun. Everyone wins. We've been debating the logo used by Lucene.Net, which all agree is terrible. We would like to have a logo design contest in the spirit of your successful campaigns to get a new logo for Lucene.Net. The new logo would symbolize the rebirth of the project and the new philosophy that goes with it. It's also a great opportunity to have a publicity stunt which will attract a lot of community interest to the project, both as users and hopefully as contributors. So, what I ask of Stack Overflow, is to host, promote, manage, and pay for our logo design contest exactly as if it was a design contest for your company's products. Would this be a reasonable request?
More than reasonable! In honor of the Lucene.Net hackathon going on right now in Ireland, I set up a 99designs.com logo contest on behalf of the Lucene.Net project.
So they can go from these old and busted logos ...
To something much, much cooler!
(As with our previous logo contests, expect some form of prize for the 2nd and 3rd place designs as well.)
So please do help us spread the word -- both about the Lucene.Net project itself, which powers search across the entire Stack Exchange network brilliantly, and also about the Lucene.Net logo contest!