Chapter 11. Intelligent search
This chapter covers
- Understanding search fundamentals
- Indexing and searching using Lucene
- Useful tools and framework for intelligent search
- Six trends in the area of intelligent search
Search is ubiquitous and a multi-billion-dollar business. According to Nielsen Net Ratings, in the month of July 2008, an estimated 4.8 billion searches[1] were carried out by Google. This amounted to 60 percent of all searches performed in the US during this period. There’s hardly any application now that doesn’t provide a search capability within the application. In this chapter, we look at how you can add search capabilities to your application using Lucene and how you can make the search intelligent.
If you haven’t done so, it’s worthwhile to review chapter 6. In that chapter, we looked at intelligent web crawling using Nutch, which uses Lucene. As a precursor to this chapter, you should have also reviewed chapter 8, in which we introduced the various Lucene analyzers and the fundamentals of text parsing.