Lucene

Lucene
Developer:	Apache Software Foundation
Latest release:	2.2.0 / 19 June 2007
OS:	Cross-platform
Genre:	Search and index API.
License:	Apache Software License
Website:	lucene.apache.org

Lucene is a free/open source information retrieval library, originally implemented in Java by Doug Cutting. It is supported by the Apache Software Foundation and is released under the Apache Software License. Lucene has been ported to programming languages including Delphi, Perl, C#, [[C++]], Python, Ruby and PHP.

While suitable for any application which requires full text indexing and searching capability, Lucene has been widely recognized for its utility in the implementation of Internet search engines and local, single-site searching. Lucene itself is just an indexing and search library and does not contain crawling and HTML parsing functionality. The Apache project Nutch is based on Lucene and provides this functionality; the Apache project Solr is a fully-featured search server based on Lucene.

At the core of Lucene's logical architecture is a notion of a document containing fields of text. This flexibility allows Lucene's API to be agnostic of file format. Text from PDFs, HTML, Microsoft Word documents, as well as many others can all be indexed so long as their textual information can be extracted.

Software using Lucene

• EB-eye_EBI's_Search_Engine EMBL-EBI's Biomedical databases search engine (contains than 200 million documents)
• Joost Internet TV uses Lucene to search for programs.
• MediaWiki can use Lucene for full-text search.
• Beagle uses a port of Lucene to C# called Lucene.Net as its indexer.
• Daisy uses Lucene for site search.
• Digg [1]
• Docco (homepage) uses Lucene for desktop search.
• DSpace (homepage) uses Lucene.
• CNET uses Lucene to search their product category listings.
• LjFind uses Lucene to search over 110,000,000 LiveJournal posts.
• Red-Piranha [2] is another Lucene based search engine. It is ready to use, deployable as a GUI, command line or Tomcat web application, and has the ability to "learn" what the user wants.
• The Flock web browser uses Clucene, a C++ version, to do a full text search of browser history.
• KnowledgeBase [3] - A service focused CRM platform which uses the Lucene search engine
• Zimbra groupware incorporates Lucene.
• Ants P2P is using Lucene for the search option, within this anonymous file sharing program.
• LIRE - Lucene Image Retrieval [4] CBIR library, which uses the Lucene search engine
• MMBase has an expansion that uses Lucene for indexing its data.
• Alfresco,[5] a free/open source Enterprise Content Management system
• Strigi [6] uses CLucene, a C++ version, to index and search the desktop.
• Midgard uses Lucene for its indexing and full-text search
• Nuxeo EP,[7] a free/open source Enterprise Content Management (ECM) platform
• Local Lucene,[8] a Geographical based searching solution using Lucene
• Perst, an open source, object-oriented embedded database, integrates with Lucene for full-text database indexing and searching and for ACID-compliant transactional protection of the Lucene index
• judy's book [9] uses Solr Lucene.
• MindTouch Deki Wiki,[10] a free open source wiki and application platform, employs dotLucene for indexing wiki pages and file attachments.
• LoopTeK Search, Internet Video content search.
• Scalix is using Lucene for their Search and Indexing Service (SIS), available in version 11 of Scalix.
• panFMP [11] is a generic and flexible framework for building metadata portals independent of metadata formats and protocols. As panFMP was developed specifically for Spatial Data Infrastructures, Lucene was extended by performant trie-based range-queries.

A more extensive list of software that uses Lucene is in the PoweredBy page of Lucene's wiki.

Ports

Lucene has been ported or is in the process of being ported to various programming languages other than Java:

• Lucene4c - C
• LuceneKit - in Objective-C for GNUstep or Cocoa
• CLucene - C++
• MUTIS - Delphi
• Lucene.Net - a straight C#/.NET port of Lucene by the Apache Software Foundation, fully compatible with it.
• Plucene - Perl
• Kinosearch - Perl
• Pylucene - Lucene interfaced with a Python front-end
• Ferret and RubyLucene - Ruby
• Zend Framework (Zend Search Lucene) - PHP
• Montezuma - Common Lisp

References

• Erik Hatcher and Otis Gospodnetic, "Lucene in Action", Manning, ISBN 1932394281

See also

• Hadoop
• Nutch
• Solr
• Compass

External links

• Lucene homepage
• Article "Behind the Scenes of the SourceForge.net Search System" by Chris Conrad
• Lucene Wikipedia indexer — introductory article with Java code for search on Wikipedia data
• Simple Lucene Examples

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