What is Apache Lucene?
Apache Lucene is a full-featured text search engine library developed by the Apache Software Foundation and written in Java.
It provides capabilities for full-text indexing and searching, hit highlighting, faceted search, sorting search results, and advanced analysis/tokenization capabilities.
Some of the key features of Lucene include:
- Flexibility to index and search any documents such as PDFs, HTML, XML, Microsoft Office documents, and text files
- Support for multiple languages using Unicode
- Powerful and fast search with ranking and highlighting of search terms
- Ability to scale from small to large data sets
- APIs for all major programming languages like Java, .NET, C++, Python, Ruby
- Integration capabilities with databases, content management systems, and applications
Apache Lucene is developed using open development methods with an active community. It is free to download and use for commercial or non-commercial applications under an Apache Software License. Many companies use Lucene for building search solutions or to support search capabilities within their applications.