Lucene in Action

Query expressions are parsed using Lucene's QueryParser along with a custom analyzer. Our custom analyzer uses the Snowball English stemmer, which allows for variations of the words you type in to be matched. For example, searching for "search" will find "searches" and "searching" also.

This is a great topic for a case study. Erik will be preparing a case study on this as an article (or series of articles) and using it for upcoming presentations. The "about" page has some technical details, but more will follow.

Otis and Erik will make book related announcements, news about Lucene in general, errata postings, etc. You can subscribe to the blog using your favorite indication reader using https://lucenebook.com/blog/?flavor=rdf (or "rss", "atom", or "rss2").

This is an artifact of how the book content was indexed (a text version of the PDF was processed, including the words split across lines). These split words are, however, searchable! There is a fair bit of analysis trickery going on to piece this stuff back together during indexing, but the stored content still contains the hyphens.

The only actual book content visible are the snippets in the search results. The search results may be useful if you don't have the book, but if you do have the book it will make more sense. Who knows where this will evolve, but there is no current plan to provide more of the book content in the search results than this. For hits in chapters 1 and 3, there is a link provided to Manning's site where those sample chapters can be downloaded in their entirety for free. The book search results are, of course, designed as teasers to (hopefully) show that we cover the topics you're interested in and that you should buy a copy of the book! (my children need to eat too )

The search feature searches (using a MultiSearcher) the blog and book content. The results are a combination of highlighted book section snippets and highlighted full blog content.

The default search operator is AND. The more you type, the less you'll find. When there are too many results, refine by adding additional terms.

It's right here, as part of the blog itself! Check out the FAQ category.