3.6. Summary

Lucene provides highly relevant search results to queries—quickly. Most applications need only a few Lucene classes and methods to enable searching. The most fundamental things for you to take away from this chapter are an understanding of the basic query types and how to access search results.

Although it can be a bit daunting, Lucene’s scoring formula (coupled with the index format discussed in appendix B and the efficient algorithms) provides the magic of returning the most relevant documents first. Lucene’s QueryParser parses human-readable query expressions, giving rich full-text search power to end users. QueryParser immediately satisfies most application requirements—but it doesn’t come without caveats, so be sure you understand the rough edges. Much of the confusion regarding QueryParser stems from unexpected analysis interactions; chapter 4 goes into great detail about analysis, including more on the QueryParser issues.