Apache Lucene is a high-performance, full-featured text search engine library written entirely in Java, that is widely used in many global corporations. It is a technology that has been developed suitable for nearly any application that requires full-text search, especially across platforms. Apache Lucene is an open source project available for free download from their websites.

Lucene plans for events where a particular patch is released with many new features. The last release, in September 2009, had many improvements like per segment searching and caching, near real-time search capabilities added to IndexWriter, new query types and smarter and more scalable multi-term queries (wildcard, range, etc).

Some of the other new features included last time were a freshly optimized collector/scorer API, improved unicode support, a new attribute based TokenStream API, and a new QueryParser framework in contribution with a core QueryParser replacement included.

There were new analyzers like PersianAnalyzer, ArabicAnalyzer and SmartChineseAnalyzer introduced during the last release in September. A new fast-vector-highlighter for large documents was also included in the release.

Lucene now includes high-performance handling of numeric fields. Such fields are indexed with a tree structure, enabling simple to use and much faster numeric range searching without having to externally pre-process numeric values into textual values.

In November 2009, another major event has been planned which includes two full days of talks, plus a meet up and the usual bevy of training that is usually conducted by the teams across many cities in the US.

As Lucene and Solr are marching ahead building new technologies to offer enterprise search as a valued proposition, the economical benefits of using them are also soaring. Lucene powers search even in discussion groups, commercial issue trackers and in email searches. It is used by diverse companies including Microsoft, Akamai, Overture, Technorati, HotJobs, Epiphany, FedEx, Mayo Clinic, MIT, New Scientist Magazine, and many others.

Lucene search application and Solr download can be made from Lucene home page.

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