Text Indexing Resources

A considerable number of text indexing solutions exist. This document discusses some of the more widely-known open source solutions.

• ht://Dig - a search engine solution for individual Web sites
• Hyper Estraier - a reasonably well-utilised solution by other software systems and applications
• Lucene - arguably the most popular text indexing solution in current use, original implementation in Java with bindings for, and ports to, other languages
• Managing Gigabytes: Compressing and Indexing Documents and Images - provides software from the book of that name
• PostgreSQL full text search - incorporates the previously separate tsearch2 functionality into recent versions of PostgreSQL (from 8.3 upwards)
• Sphinx - used by numerous large-scale public Web sites and services in a traditional document search role
• Swish-e - a Web site indexer "ideally suited for collections of a million documents or smaller", derived from SWISH
• SWISH++ - an indexing and searching engine typically used for documents on Web sites, derived from Swish-e
• Terrier - supports various formats and large collections ("in a centralised architecture to at least 25 million documents, and using the Hadoop Map Reduce distributed indexing scheme for even larger collections"), implemented in Java
• Whoosh - a pure Python search engine, apparently attracting interest from various other Python-based projects reluctant to use Lucene, Xapian and other technologies
• Wumpus - an information retrieval system being used to investigate desktop search solutions, amongst other things
• Xapian - a reasonably popular solution implemented in C++ with bindings for various languages, with a heritage dating back to 1984 and earlier
• Zebra - supports "large databases (more than ten gigabytes of data, tens of millions of records)", implemented in C
• Zettair - previously known as Lucy (possibly the Lucene derivative of that name) which has "indexed the 426GB TREC terabyte track collection", implemented in C

Some links to comparisons and summaries:

• Full text search on Wikipedia
• Open Source Search Engines, Retrieval Tools and Libraries
• A Comparison of Open Source Search Engines - a controversial set of benchmarks applied to various solutions
• On open source IR - mischaracterises the rationale for copyleft and includes various now-unmaintained solutions, but also mentions solutions which are now widely used (such as Lucene)