Apache Lucene is a high-performance, full-featured text search engine library written entirely in Java. It is a technology suitable for nearly any application that requires full-text search, especially cross-platform.

Apache Lucene is an open source project available for free download from Apache Jakarta. Please use the links on the left to access Lucene.

21 February 2006 - 1.9 RC1 available

This release candidate has many improvements since release 1.4.3, including new features, performance improvements, bug fixes, etc. See CHANGES.txt for details.

1.9 will be the last 1.x release. It is both back-compatible with 1.4.3 and forward-compatible with the upcoming 2.0 release. Many methods and classes in 1.4.3 have been deprecated in 1.9 and will be removed in 2.0. Applications must compile against 1.9 without deprecation warnings before they are compatible with 2.0.

Binary and source distributions are available here.

26 January 2006 - Nightly builds available

Nightly builds of the current development version of Lucene, to be released as Lucene 1.9, are now available at http://cvs.apache.org/dist/lucene/java/nightly/.

28 October 2005 - Lucene at ApacheCon

Monday, December 12, 2005 at 3pm by Grant Ingersoll:
Abstract:
Lucene is a high performance, scalable, cross-platform search engine that contains many advanced features that often go untapped by the majority of users. In this session, designed for those familiar with Lucene, we will examine some of Lucene's more advanced topics and their application, including:

1. Term Vectors: Manual and Pseudo relevance feedback; Advanced document collection analysis for domain specialization
2. Span Queries: Better phrase matching; Candidate Identification for Question Answering
3. Tying it all Together: Building a search framework for experimentation and rapid deployment
4. Case Studies from CNLP: Crosslingual/multilingual retrieval in Arabic, English and Dutch; Sublanguage specialization for commercial trouble ticket analysis; Passage retrieval and analysis for Question Answering application

Topics 1 through 3 will provide technical details on implementing the advanced Lucene features, while the fourth topic will provide a broader context for understanding when and where to use these features.

14 February 2005 - Lucene moves to Apache top-level

Lucene has migrated from Apache's Jakarta project to the top-level. Along with this migration, the source code repository has been converted to Subversion. The migration is in progress with some loose ends. Please stay tuned!

December 2004 - Lucene in Action is published

The first book dedicated solely to Lucene is published. The "search inside the book" feature implemented with Lucene can be seen at lucenebook.com.

29 November 2004 - Lucene 1.4.3 Released

This fixes a few bugs in 1.4.2. See CHANGES.txt for details. Binary and source distributions are available here.