From a quiet start as a pet project to a giant in the industry, Apache Lucene is definitely the little (search) engine that could.  On September 18th, 2001 (at 16:29:48 UTC) Jason Van Zyl made the first official import of Doug Cutting’s Lucene project (which started in 1997 and was hosted on SourceForge) into Apache’s Jakarta project (check out the Wayback machine).

And while I wasn’t around in the beginning, I thought I would …

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After a week off to enjoy time with my family, I thought I would kick off the last week of 2010 with a look back at the year as it relates to the Apache Lucene ecosystem.  For anyone who follows the amalgamation of projects that I like to call the Lucene Ecosystem (the Apache projects: Lucene, Solr, Nutch, Mahout, Tika, PyLucene, Lucy, Lucene.NET, Droids, ManifoldCF — Lucene Connector Framework, OpenNLP and UIMA) you know it …

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Do you remember this scenario from days of yore?

• Company A buys a software license from Company B, a startup.
• Company A crosses its fingers that Company B doesn’t go bankrupt and disappear, along with the source code for Company A’s mission-critical software.
• Company B goes kaput.
• Company A is left with some machine-readable binary code that it is powerless to develop or use.

Source code escrow has changed the outcome of this sticky situation …

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After reviewing a lot of great talk proposals, we’ve announced the agenda for Apache Lucene Eurocon: Apache Lucene EuroCon – Europe’s Premier Lucene and Solr Search User Conference.

One of the things I really like about this agenda is it is a great mix of basics, use cases from all over the search map (CMS, news, social media, advertising), business decisions (see last list and next list) and advanced topics (NLP, collab filtering, machine …

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Short Version

The Apache Lucene Connector Framework project has officially entered incubation.  LCF, for short, is going to be a framework for connecting to content repositories like Sharepoint, Documentum, etc. and will make it easy to hook into Lucene, Solr, Nutch, Mahout, Tika, while, of course, remaining agnostic of the final destination of the data.  See the Connectors website and the original proposal for more info.  Help wanted!

Long Version

Background

A while back, MetaCarta…

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It’s that time of year, so I thought I would take a look back at the year that was for the Lucene Ecosystem and maybe look ahead just a little bit too.

First and foremost, it should be obvious to even the most casual observer that the Apache Lucene communities are thriving.  Not only is it a great time to be involved in open source, it’s a great time to be involved in Lucene.  Both …

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