News You Can Bruise for 2001 September 20

Kris is bitter, and I don't blame him.

Today I attended meetings and hacked on Lucene, the Java search API which always makes me think of the "obscure polearms" section of the old Unearthed Arcana AD&D book, which contained a weapon called the lucerne hammer.

Lucene is great. I wrote a proposal for cross-component search for Helm, blithely assuming that there was only one rational way to design a search engine; then panicked when I discovered that all the open source search engines were basically single-purpose scripts designed to crawl a web site and index the Web content; then looked at Lucene and rejoyced at its flexibility. It's designed as if implementing my ideas on the one rational way to design a search engine. How could I not love a piece of software that caters to my prejudices to such an extent?

It's also pretty fast at indexing, especially the way I plan to split up the indexes.

Sumana and I came up with a little song for the cross-component search:

One search to search them all
One search to array them
One search to rank them all
And on the page display them