BHC Upgrade Core Framework to Lucene 2.4

As part of our ongoing enhancements to our core framework, we have upgraded Lucene to the latest version 2.4 and added new features.  Our searches now include rich, Google-type search functionality.  Users now have the ability to perform AND and OR searches, include and exclude parameters using + and -, and search over phrases with “”.  We have also improved the relevancy in our searching allowing us to display the most relevant results first as well as apply boosting to terms in order to affect the ordering. 

In addition to these features, we have also made our Lucene searching more configurable so that we can produce more relevant results in different situations. 

Finally, with the upgrade to Lucene 2.4, our Lucene searching and indexing has been made faster and more efficient.  You can view these upgrades to our framework in action at Lawbooks.com.au where we have not only used Lucene for searching, but for all of the Browse pages as well.  Doing so has allowed us to maintain low response times when browsing the site while keeping a large amount of data.