Lucene in Action, Second Edition

Preface to the First Edition

From Erik Hatcher

I’ve been intrigued with searching and indexing from the early days of the Internet. I have fond memories (circa 1991) of managing an email list using majordomo, MUSH (Mail User’s Shell), and a handful of Perl, awk, and shell scripts. I implemented a CGI web interface to allow users to search the list archives and other users’ profiles using grep tricks under the covers. Then along came Yahoo!, AltaVista, and Excite, all which I visited regularly.

After my first child, Jakob, was born, my digital photo archive began growing rapidly. I was intrigued with the idea of developing a system to manage the pictures so that I could attach metadata to each picture, such as keywords and date taken, and, ...