I'm trying to decide on an open source search/indexing technology for a .Net project. It seems like the standard out there for Java projects is Lucene, but as far as .Net is concerned, the Lucene.Net project seems to be pretty inactive. Is this still the best option out there? Or are there other viable alternatives?
11 Answers
lucene.net will necessarily lag the java one since it is a port. I also don't like how the lucene port is a straight copy although it does make it easier on the docs I suppose. Something to consider is using Solr if you don't need super tight (binary) integration. I have used it before with good success. It is still powered by Lucene but I think it is better since it has some better features. You can use it from .net via an HTTP endpoint.
One question to ask yourself is what you really need/want in a search solution. There are a lot of ways to go about implementing search and not all solutions work for every situation.
SQLite has FTS3 (Full Text Search 3) that may do what you want it to do. I don't have direct experience with it, but I believe it was developed explicitly to do what Lucene does, at least in the simple case. I don't believe you can alter the tokenizer or anything (without modifying source code, anyway), but it's an option.
Although its not .net i would recommend using Solr as its built on lucene and will be simple to integrate given the fact it returns XML/HTTP and JSON
Have a look at www.searcharoo.net. It has a crawler, and features like work stemming, indexing office documents/PDFs. The author is very active on the codeproject articles and responds to questions pretty quickly.
Related