Best indexing/search library
Rating: 8 out of 10
IncentivizedUse Cases and Deployment Scope
In my previous position at a higher education university, we had implemented several applications that relied on embedded Lucene search and indexing capabilities. Our Java-based web applications were used internally by stuff as well as externally by students and other state organizations. One of the modules allowed clients to search for students and their uploaded documents matching certain querying parameters.
Pros
- We found Apache Lucene to be extremely performant in querying large amounts of data and retrieving the correct files based on the metadata provided.
- The online community offers great support for the product. Even though it is an open source tool, it is not difficult to find help online for it.
- When we were creating a proof of concept application, we found that the software worked just as well, while being run locally on a resource-limited PC.
Cons
- We had difficulty porting the project to a cluster based environment on the cloud.
- For our particular use case of retrieving documents based on text pattern matching, the program worked efficiently however, we did not find many resources for image pattern recognition based on their metadata.
Likelihood to Recommend
Apache Lucene offers great full-text search library that makes it easy to add search functionality to a website or other applications. Lucene is ideal if you want low-level access to the indexes and its APIs. For general purposes, Apache Solr, the web application built atop of Lucene can be used instead. Apache Solr comes with caching, HTTP/ JSON APIs and a simple web administration console.