Five pages to getting started with Lucene.Net - Introducing Lucene.Net - Greg's Cool [Insert Clever Name] of the Day

Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Five pages to getting started with Lucene.Net - Introducing Lucene.Net

“Lucene.Net is a high performance Information Retrieval (IR) library, also known as a search engine library. Lucene.Net contains powerful APIs for creating full text indexes and implementing advanced and precise search technologies into your programs. Some people may confuse Lucene.net with a ready to use application like a web search/crawler, or a file search application, but Lucene.Net is not such an application, it's a framework library. Lucene.Net provides a framework for implementing these difficult technologies yourself. Lucene.Net makes no discriminations on what you can index and search, which gives you a lot more power compared to other full text indexing/searching implications; you can index anything that can be represented as text. There are also ways to get Lucene.Net to index HTML, Office documents, PDF files, and much more.

Lucene.Net is an API per API port of the original Lucene project, which is written in Java even the unit tests were ported to guarantee the quality. Also, Lucene.Net index is fully compatible with the Lucene index, and both libraries can be used on the same index together with no problems. A number of products have used Lucene and Lucene.Net to build their searches; some well known websites include Wikipedia, CNET, Monster.com, Mayo Clinic, FedEx, and many more. But, it’s not just web sites that have used Lucene; there is also a product that has used Lucene.Net, called Lookout, which is a search tool for Microsoft Outlook that just brought Outlook’s integrated search to look painfully slow and inaccurate.

Lucene.Net is currently undergoing incubation at the Apache Software Foundation. Its source code is held in a subversion repository and can be found here. If you need help downloading the source, you can use the free TortoiseSVN, or RapidSVN. The Lucene.Net project always welcomes new contributors. And, remember, there are many ways to contribute to an open source project other than writing code.

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I know I’m a day late and a dollar short with this as it’s been already linked to by most the top .Net link bloggers, still I’ve been watching the Lucene.Net space for years (4+) and am happy to link to another article on how to get started with it (as I swear I’m going to use it one day… really, truly I am…! ;)

The article is short and sweet and to the point. It provides a great starting point for getting going with Lucene.Net (funny that given the article title) with a adding a “document” to index as well as how to search. I think this is one of the best getting started with Lucene.Net guides I’ve seen in a while…