Difference between Search Core and Search Lucene API

Posted by vreugde on May 13, 2009 at 12:49pm

Hi there

Lately i have being looking around for a good search module, and i have found the Search Lucene API.
But i cannot find what the big differences are between the Search Lucene API and the Search from the core.

Can somebody help me?

Greetz Maikel

Comments

DIfferences between Search Lucene API and core search

Posted by cpliakas on June 11, 2009 at 8:00pm

Hi.

I am the author of the Search Lucene API module. The major difference is that Lucene is an extremely advanced search engine library that offers much more functionality than core search. Below are some of the features that Search Lucene API has which core search does not:

Wildcard searching - ap* will match application, apple, and ape.
Fuzzy searching, based on Levenstein distance - test~ will match tent, Dropal~ will match Drupal.
Proximity searches - "Drupal php"~5 will match Drupal and php within 5 words of each other.
Term boosting - Drupal^4 php will match documents with Drupal or php, but will make documents with Drupal more relevant in the search results.
Support for all of the following boolean operators: AND, OR, AND NOT
Term Grouping - (framework OR library) AND php syntax is allowed.

Search Lucene API also has build in caching to improve search performance, and it is not SQL based which tends to be slow for textual searches. In addition, it is Drush aware and has a built-in Facet API to allow developers to easily create facets. Facets can also be managed via the administrative interface. Search Lucene API also exposes more hooks than the core search so you can interact with the search process without having to rewrite code.

Hope this helps,
Chris

As of the 2.0 release, Search

Posted by cpliakas on October 22, 2009 at 9:42pm

As of the 2.0 release, Search Lucene API also has a built-in facet API to display facets in many different ways, more advanced content bias settings, the ability to sort search results by field, and it correctly highlights matches when using projects such as Porter-Stemmer.

How does this fit with Google

Posted by Road Runner on October 23, 2009 at 11:34am

How does this fit with Google Custom Search? I guess I'm not sure about all the technologies involved. I use Google Custom because it allows me to present Adsense ads - not sure what else it will do yet.

Apple and oranges

Posted by David Latapie on December 29, 2010 at 2:52am

Google custom search

call to an external provider (Google) for search
Google's power and keywords
not much to configure.

Lucene API

in-house search (not dependant to someone else's will)
visual integration with your site for free (this is at least 100$/year for Google)
no ad (well, you can still use your own AdSense, but at least you are getting paid for them)
works with Drupal 7 (no Google custom search module works with Drupal 7 as of now)
some extra power compared to Google (as described above) but also a lot less power in other areas (like this impressive cheatsheet)

Hope this helps.