What is the best search approach using Lucene?

Question

I'm using lucene in my project. Here is my question: should I use lucene to replace the whole search module which has been implemented with sql using a large number of like statement and accurate search by id or sth, or should I just use lucene in fuzzy search(i mean full text search)?

Answer 1

I don't think using like statement abusively is a good idea. And I believe the performance of lucene will be better than database.

Answer 2

Probably you should use lucene, unless the SQL search is very performant.

We are right now moving to Solr (based on Lucene) because our search queries are inherently slow, and cannot be sped up with our database.... If you have reasonably large tables, your search queries will start to get really slow unless the DB has some kind of highly optimized free text search mechanisms.

Thus, let Lucene do what it does best....

Answer 3

I'm actually very impressed by Solr, at work we were looking for a replacement for our Google Mini (it's woefully inadequate for any serious site search) and were expecting something that would take a while to implement. Within 30 minutes of installing Solr we had done what we had expected to take at least a few days and provided us with a far more powerful search interface than we had before.

You could probably use Solr to do quite a lot of clever things beyond a simple site search.