Lucene Finds its Way to the Top
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.
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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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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.
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