A Little Lucene History
March 26, 2015
Instead of venturing to Wikipedia to learn about Lucene’s history, visit the Parse.ly blog and read the post, “Lucene: The Good Parts.” After detailing how Doug Cutting created Lucene in 1999, the post describes how searching through SQL in the early 2000s was a huge task. SQL databases are not the best when it comes to unstructured search, so developers installed Lucene to make SQL document search more reliable. What is interesting is how much it has been adopted:
“At the time, Solr and Elasticsearch didn’t yet exist. Solr would be released in one year by the team at CNET. With that release would come a very important application of Lucene: faceted search. Elasticsearch would take another 5 years to be released. With its recent releases, it has brought another important application of Lucene to the world: aggregations. Over the last decade, the Solr and Elasticsearch packages have brought Lucene to a much wider community. Solr and Elasticsearch are now being considered alongside data stores like MongoDB and Cassandra, and people are genuinely confused by the differences.”
If you need a refresher or a brief overview of how Lucene works, related jargon, tips for using in big data projects, and a few more tricks. Lucene might just be a java library, but it makes using databases much easier. We have said for a while, information is only useful if you can find it easily. Lucene made information search and retrieval much simpler and accurate. It set the grounds for the current big data boom.
Whitney Grace, March 26, 2015
Stephen E Arnold, Publisher of CyberOSINT at www.xenky.com
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