Apache Lucene Review

Incremental Indexing

As an indexing technology, Apache Lucene offers a feature called incremental indexing. This feature allows users to add, change, or remove documents in their index without the need to re-index all contents within the index. By using timestamps, the index will identify the documents that were newly created, modified, or deleted, and what will be re-indexed are only those contents related to those documents. This feature is very advantageous for users who are managing a large database and who need to change their data often like network publishers.

Scalable And High-Performance Indexing

The indexing capability of Apache Lucene is scalable and has a high performance. In fact, it lets users process a large number of documents and index them in less time. This is because the search engine library supports the indexing of over 50 GB of documents or data within an hour. In addition, as they perform indexing, they only need to allocate a minimal amount of RAM for such task which is 1MB heap.

Handle Sophisticated Searches And Generate Accurate Results

Apache Lucene makes it easy for searchers to find any information or content they need. Through the aid of its powerful, accurate, and efficient search algorithms, users will be able to precisely deliver whatever searchers are looking for. This makes the search engine library a truly world-class search technology that can handle sophisticated searches and generate search results in an advanced and modern way.

Enable Fielded Search

For example, accurate searching can be implemented by enabling a fielded search functionality on websites and applications. Basically, searchers are looking for pieces of information that are stored in a database and are defined and labelled in the search index during the indexing process. These pieces of information are organized in specific areas called fields. The most common types of fields are author, title, subject, and abstract fields. For example, the author field contains the names of authors of books or articles, the titles of these books or articles are found in the title field, words or terms used in the books or articles are organized in the subject field, and the overviews of the authors’ works can be accessed from the abstract field.

In a basic type of search, the database normally finds information from all of the fields after a searcher makes a query. Thus, if fielded searching is not enabled, someone who is searching for a particular article will view short results that contain the name of the author of the article but he or she will also see articles that mentioned the author and discussed the work of the author. Thus, field searching is a way of instructing the database to look for information only from a specific area or field so searches won’t be overloaded with pieces of information which make it difficult for them to find the information they need.

Deliver Relevant Content Through Search Results Ranking

Apache Lucene also enables users to rank their search results so that searchers will be able to see first the contents that are most relevant to what they are looking for. In addition, the search engine library allows them to use different ranking models as they rank their search results which include Vector Space Model and Okapi BM25.

Search And Merge Data From Multiple Indices

Apache Lucene has a multi-index searching capability. With this capability, pieces of information and content are searched on multiple indices all at once. Interestingly, whatever data it gathers from each index can be combined together, generating merged search results where searches can dynamically view how pieces of information are being used in various scenarios or conditions.