Wednesday, October 04, 2006 2:08 PM
jindar
Lucene.Net - not your Grandma's Search Engine
If anyone has ever needed to use (or write) a robust search engine, you should check out Lucene.Net. It's been around for a while and has gone through several phases/iterations.
Here are some of the features that are touted on dotlucene.net (a website that provides some great info on Lucene.Net):
- Very good performance
- Ranked search results
- Search query highlighting in results
- Searches structured and unstructured data
- Metadata searching (query by date, search custom fields...)
- Index size approximately 30% of the indexed text
- Can store also full indexed documents
- Pure managed .NET in a single assembly
- Very friendly licensing (Apache Software License 2.0)
- Localizable (support for Brazilian, Czech, Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Japanese, Korean and Russian included in DotLucene National Language Support Pack)
- Extensible (source code included)
- Lucene.Net is a port of Jakarta Lucene to .NET (C#) maintained by George Aroush
- Project home: http://incubator.apache.org/lucene.net/
- Index is compatible with the Java version (Lucene)
(feature list from
http://www.dotlucene.net)
One of the really awesome capabilities is that the indexes are compatible with original Java Lucene project, so you can use products like Nutch or Hadoop and access the Lucene index from an asp.net frontend (or whatever application has a reference to the Lucene assembly).
Lucene.Net also has a very active community of developers behind it, and they just had a release on Sept. 30. The latest release is built on the 1.1 Framework, but yesterday I was able to convert Lucene.Net to the 2.0 Framework in less than 10 minutes. The developers are working on Lucene.Net version 2.0 and should have an official release for the 2.0 Framework soon. But so far I haven't see anything that would prevent anyone from running Lucene.Net on the 2.0 framework today.
A note about versions: The lastest release is Lucene.Net 1.9.1 - the old project on Sourceforge is not longer valid and is not maintained there since Lucene.Net is an incubator project now.
Filed under: .NET, C#, ASP.NET, Nutch, Lucene.Net, Hadoop