Comparison Highlights Lucene

August 3, 2010

Vik Singh has posted a thorough and impartial comparative analysis of selected search engines. Singh used his own testing code, and kept the playing field level by not changing any numerical tuning parameters. He summarizes by saying:

Based on these preliminary results and anecdotal information I’ve collected from the web and people in the field (with more emphasis on the latter), I would probably recommend Lucene (which is an IR library – use a wrapper platform like Solr w/ Nutch if you need all the search dressings like snippets, crawlers, servlets) for many vertical search indexing applications – especially if you need something that runs decently well out of the box (as that’s what I’m mainly evaluating here) and community support.

Lucene earned a perfect 5/5 for support–highest of all tested platforms. (You can download Lucene/Solr at Lucid Imagination.)

As an IT professional, you are always on the lookout for ways to cut costs, and you also know that software licenses aren’t getting any cheaper, particularly for popular pro-sumer products such as Photoshop and Dreamweaver. http://www.osalt.com hosts a treasure trove of free, high-quality open source alternatives designed to save you time and money and still deliver a first-rate final product. By choosing an open source product, the user obtains a number of advantages compared to commercial products. Besides the fact that open source is always available for free, it is a transparent application, in that you are invited exclusively behind the scenes to view all source code and thereby to suggest improvements to the product. Furthermore, every product is covered by a large dedicated network, or community, who is more than willing to answer any questions you may have. http://www.osalt.com is definitely worth bookmarking.

Brett Quinn, August 3, 2010

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under News, Open source, Search, Text processing

Comments

One Response to “Comparison Highlights Lucene”

Avi Rappoport, Search Tools Consulting on August 3rd, 2010 6:49 pm

I hope someone can update Vik’s article, a year is a long time between tests.

Avi

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.