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Hibernate Search in Action
Posted: April 29th, 2009, 3:58pm CEST

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I joined an e-commerce company in 2000, nothing unusual I suppose. We were quite annoyed by the quality of Amazon’s search engine results compared to ours. A few years later, we reimplemented our search engine from scratch using Lucene. That’s where I learned that a good search engine is 50% kick-ass technology and 50% deep understanding of the business and the users you serve. Then I sailed different seas and joined the Hibernate team and, later on, JBoss Inc.

It must be Destiny that a few years later I worked on unifying Hibernate and Lucene. Hibernate Search’s design has been influenced by the work on Java Persistence and JBoss Seam: ease of use, domain model-centric, annotation-driven and focused on providing a unified experience to the developer. Hibernate Search brings full-text search to Hibernate application without programmatic shift or infrastructural code.

Search is now a key component of our digital life (Google, Spotlight, Amazon, Facebook). Virtually every website, every application, has to provide a human-friendly, word-centric search. While Google addresses the internet, Spotlight searches your desktop files, Amazon focuses on products, and Facebook finds people. I firmly believe Lucene’s flexibility is a key differentiator for developers building business-centric search engines. This has also influenced the design on Hibernate Search: While Hibernate Search relieves you of the burdens of indexing and retrieving objects, we made sure that all the flexibility of Lucene is accessible to you, especially when you build queries.