Lucene Finds its Way to the Top

By Brice Dunwoodie | Published Feb 17, 2005

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has recently reclassified the Lucene search engine project from a Jakarta sub-project to a top-level ASF effort.

Lucene is a full text search engine that provides an API and a set of libraries enabling powerful search functionality to be included in all types of Java applications. Doug Cutting is the project's primary developer.

Lucene is offered as a developer toolkit, and requires a certain amount of Java development to implement or integrate a functional search solution.

As an example, for web search, a developer would need to write their own web site spider that populated the Lucene index with Lucene documents.

On the retrieval side, the developer would then need to provide a form handler and query parser that called into the Lucene API for search hits and formatted the results for web presentation.

Given this, its best to think of Lucene as a developer resource and not as a ready to run search engine.

There are several ports of Lucene to other languages. Of note are DotLucene (C# .NET) and Plucene (PERL).

Plucene is currently used by Technorati, is embedded in the Eclipse IDE, and is part of www.furl.com's tools.

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2 Reader Comments

1 |

anon — April 6, 2005 4:14 PM

It's Lucene, not PLucene that's used by Technorati. The developer does not have to provide a query parser, Lucene has a good default query parser.

2 |

Brice Dunwoodie — April 23, 2005 1:48 AM

Thanks for the correction.

You are right that there is a query parser as part of Lucene and Plucene. However, there are some very common query sytax expressions that will cause problems with that parser. I strong doubt one would put the "stock" parser into production.

I my experience, its a much more common practice to implement an intermediary parser that handles more syntax cases and one that is often tuned to what the given audience needs/expects.

-Brice