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Apache Lucene

Score10 out of 10

9 Reviews and Ratings

What is Apache Lucene?

Apache Lucene is an open source and free text search engine library written in Java. It is a technology suitable for applications that requires full-text search, and is available cross-platform.

Categories & Use Cases

Media

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Efficient Open Source Search Engine

Pros

  • Fast indexing, with proper optimization I can index a Gig of data in 2 mins.
  • Easy integration with web crawlers
  • Quick and Accurate Results
  • Flexible sorting option for results based on the search field and relevance

Cons

  • Scalable issues especially when the index grows in size with millions of documents.
  • The Boolean scoring model could be better.
  • Difficulty setting up on cluster based environment.

Return on Investment

  • Cost effective
  • Opensource and easily customizable
  • Active community and feedback forums

Alternatives Considered

Apache Solr, Amazon Elasticsearch Service and Google Search Appliance

Other Software Used

React, Oracle WebLogic Suite, Apache Derby

Review of Apache Lucene

Pros

  • Quick search of very large amounts of data on a single machine instance.
  • Extremely memory and disk efficient/performance.
  • Easy to setup and integrate into external systems.

Cons

  • User interface for setup and maintenance would be helpful.
  • Easier cloud/cluster setup.
  • Better, centralized documentation.

Return on Investment

  • Very good at using minimal hardware sets saving money on hosting.
  • Very good at housing multiple cores or instances.

Other Software Used

MySQL, Zend PHP Engine, Apache Solr

Best indexing/search library

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.

Return on Investment

  • Being an open source project we did not have to pay any licensing fees for using Apache Lucene. It has greatly improved our search functionality in our web apps.

Alternatives Considered

Apache Solr, Apache Spark, Apache Kafka, Apache Tomcat, Apache Cordova, Apache Derby and Apache Web Server

Other Software Used

Apache Derby, Apache Solr, Apache Tomcat, Apache Subversion, Apache Spark