Apache Lucene

What is Apache Lucene?

Apache Lucene is a high-performance, full-featured text search engine library written entirely in Java. It is a technology suitable for nearly any application that requires full-text search, especially cross-platform. Apache Lucene is an open-source project available for free download. Lucene offers a range of powerful features through a simple API, including scalable and high-performance indexing, with the ability to index over 150GB of data per hour on modern hardware while requiring only 1MB of heap memory. It supports incremental indexing as fast as batch indexing, resulting in an index size that is roughly 20-30 the size of the text indexed Lucene's search algorithms are powerful, accurate, and efficient, providing ranked searching to return the best results first. It supports many powerful query types, such as phrase queries, wildcard queries, proximity queries, and range queries, as well as fielded searching (e.g., title, author, contents). The library also enables sorting by any field, searching multiple indexes with merged results, and allows simultaneous update and searching. Lucene offers flexible faceting, highlighting, joins, and result grouping, as well as fast, memory-efficient, and typo-tolerant query suggestions. It provides a pluggable ranking model, including the Vector Space Model and Okapi BM25, and a configurable storage engine (codecs)

Highlights

• Scalable and high-performance indexing, capable of indexing over 150GB of data per hour on modern hardware
• Efficient index size, roughly 20-30 the size of the text indexed
• Support for a wide range of powerful query types, including phrase queries, wildcard queries, proximity queries, and range queries
• Ability to search multiple indexes with merged results and allow simultaneous update and searching
• Flexible faceting, highlighting, joins, and result grouping capabilities