New Features of Apache Lucene Search Engine (Sarah Turner)
Oct 27, 2009
Apache Lucene is a high-performance, full-featured text search engine library written entirely in Java, that is widely used in many global corporations. It is a technology that has been developed suitable for nearly any application that requires full-text search, especially across platforms. Apache Lucene is an open source project available for free download from their websites.
Lucene usually plans events to commemorate a particular release. The last release was in September 2009, where many new features were introduced to users. Some of the improvements are per segment searching and caching, near real-time search capabilities added to IndexWriter, new query types and smarter and more scalable multi-term queries (wildcard, range, etc).
Some of the other new features included last time were a freshly optimized collector/scorer API, improved unicode support, a new attribute based TokenStream API, and a new QueryParser framework in contribution with a core QueryParser replacement included.
Analyzers like PersianAnalyzer, ArabicAnalyzer and SmartChineseAnalyzer were new capabilities that were added to the existing ones. A new fast-vector-highlighter for large documents was also included in the release.
Lucene now includes high-performance handling of numeric fields. Such fields are indexed with a tree structure, enabling simple to use and much faster numeric range searching without having to externally pre-process numeric values into textual values.
In November 2009, another major event has been planned which includes two full days of talks, plus a meet up and the usual bevy of training that is usually conducted by the teams across many cities in the US.
With Lucene and Solr going ahead and building new technologies for enterprise search, the economical benefits realized through their usage is also increasing. Lucene powers searches in areas like discussion groups, commercial issue trackers and in email searches. It is used by many Fortune 100 companies including Microsoft, Akamai, Overture, Technorati, HotJobs, Epiphany, FedEx, Mayo Clinic, MIT, New Scientist Magazine, and many others.
About the AuthorLucene search application and Solr download can be made from Lucene home page..