Lucene


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At Black & Hayden Consulting, we offer a number of Lucene solutions. This page provides a brief overview of our services, skill set and examples of Lucene projects we've been involved with.

Lucene Services

  • General consulting services
  • Lucene mentoring
  • Architecture advise & design
  • Optimisation and analysis services
  • Use of our framework either within our environment or yours


Lucene Overview

Lucene is a high-performance, open source search framework which allows websites and applications to perform fast, full-text searches. Lucene is flexible enough to index data from databases, pdfs, html, Microsoft Word documents and much more.  It can also be partnered with technology such as Nutch, a web crawler and html parser, to index website content.

Lucene Experience

Below are some examples of Lucene implementations by Black & Hayden Consulting:

  • Emporium Books: Emporium Books is an online bookstore offering over 7 million titles for sale and has been built using BHC’s custom Lucene web framework. In order to handle the large catalog of products, both the category browse and the search functionality make use of Lucene. The resulting product is a website with great performance and Google-like search capabilities.
  • MediaBizNet: MediaBizNet is an online business directory site with a business to business focus. Both the browse and search functionality are built with BHC’s Lucene framework which allows the site to have near-instantaneous response times.  MediaBizNet makes use of field weightings and behind the scenes keywords to influence results and ensure that the most relevant companies appear at the top of a search.
  • MediaNet: BHC has consulted for MediaNet on a number of Lucene projects.  These projects include performing a Lucene version upgrade, optimizing their indexing and search speeds and improving the relevancy of search results.


Black & Hayden Lucene Website Architecture

Over the past 3 years at Black & Hayden consulting, we have built a highly configurable Lucene framework that is used in many of our website projects.  This framework allows all BHC websites, both small and large to leverage Lucene’s high speed, Google-style searching.  This search framework is quite flexible and is used in a variety of places from searching news articles to product browse pages on e-commerce websites.  We have also heavily customized Lucene to include features that are not in standard Lucene implementations and are constantly adding more.  Highlights of our framework include:

  • Ability to perform both simple and advanced searches
  • Ability to sort results by relevancy or by specific fields
  • Ability to perform "fuzzy" searching to correct for spelling mistakes
  • Google-style searching with operators such as wildcards, AND, OR, NOT etc.
  • Highly scalable and able to search across millions of items
  • Ability to perform faceted searching and filtering
  • Configurable indexes built from a database or other source
  • Handles both full and incremental index updates
  • Ability to easily tweak document and field boosting to influence relevancy
  • Constant upgrades to the framework ensure that major Lucene revisions are implemented shortly after release (Currently using Lucene 3.0.0)


Lucene Consulting

At Black & Hayden Consulting, we have extensive experience working with many different Lucene implementations across different environments.  As a result, we are able to seamlessly integrate Lucene into different applications while customizing it to fit specific needs.  We are also experienced in providing analysis of existing Lucene systems and can quickly diagnose issues and recommend or implement the appropriate solutions.  Consulting services that we provide include the following:

  • Adding Lucene search to different applications
  • Adding custom search features (faceted searching, hit highlighting, keyword searching, etc.)
  • Properly handling special characters such as hyphens or accented letters
  • Diagnosing and fixing performance issues during search
  • Diagnosing and fixing performance issues during indexing
  • Determining why certain search queries don’t return the desired results
  • Explaining and tweaking the relevancy scoring calculations
  • Performing Lucene version upgrades


Lucene Implementations

Below are some more sites that BHC has implemented Lucene into:

  • Emporium Books uses Lucene for search, browse and advanced search across 7 million titles
  • eBookBop uses Lucene for search, browse and advanced search
  • Chris Bowen uses Lucene to perform text and tag searching across news articles
  • War & Peace Games uses Lucene to search across e-commerce products
  • Hot Potato uses Lucene to search several areas at once including news, auctions etc.
  • MediaBizNet uses Lucene for search and browse
  • Booktopia uses a custom Lucene on top of Elastic Path to greatly increase the speed of search and browse functionality


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