One of the popular high-performing, full-featured text search engine library that is completely written in Java, and which is currently used by many global corporations is the Apache Lucene search engine. The search engine has been developed suitable for nearly any application that requires full-text search, especially for cross-platforms. It is an open source project available for free download for organizations.

When a new version is released, Lucene organizes for events where the new features will be highlighted. During the last release in September 2009 the new version featured new capabilities. Some of them are: per segment searching and caching, near real-time search capabilities added to IndexWriter, new query types and smarter and more scalable multi-term queries (wildcard, range, etc).

The other new features that were included consist of: a freshly optimized collector/scorer API, improved unicode support, a new attribute based TokenStream API, and a new QueryParser framework in contribution with a core QueryParser replacement included.

There were new analyzers like PersianAnalyzer, ArabicAnalyzer and SmartChineseAnalyzer introduced during the last release in September. A new fast-vector-highlighter for large documents was also included in the release.

Lucene’s new version included high-performance handling of numeric fields. These fields are indexed with a tree structure, enabling ease-of-use and much faster numeric range searching without having to externally pre-process numeric values into textual values.

Similar to the event in September, a new event is planned for November 2009. Events such as two full days of talks, plus a meet up and the usual bevy of training that is usually conducted by the teams across many cities in the US is planned this time too.

With Lucene and Solr going ahead and building new technologies for enterprise search, the economical benefits realized through their usage is also increasing. Lucene powers searches in areas like discussion groups, commercial issue trackers and in email searches. It is used by many Fortune 100 companies including Microsoft, Akamai, Overture, Technorati, HotJobs, Epiphany, FedEx, Mayo Clinic, MIT, New Scientist Magazine, and many others.

Lucene search application and Solr download can be made from Lucene home page.