How Lucene came to be

Lucene is the brainchild of Doug Cutting (pictured), who has been working in the field of information retrieval for over a decade.

Beginning in 1988, Doug spent five years at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) developing novel approaches to information access. These included a high-performance retrieval engine, several innovative search paradigms, advanced linguistic analysis methods, and high-quality text summarization algorithms. This work resulted in seven publications and six issued patents. Some of these technologies are now marketed by Inxight.

In 1993, Doug moved to Apple's Advanced Technology Group (ATG). There he developed a state-of-the-art retrieval engine code-named V-Twin. This engine was to be a part of the Copland operating system, automatically indexing the content of all files as they are created so that the the entire file system could be efficiently searched at any time. Copland was cancelled, but V-Twin has been used in several other Apple products.

In April of 1996, Doug left Apple and joined Excite. Here he took over development of the core search technology. This included growing Excite's web index from two million to fifty million pages; substantially optimizing Excite's search performance; adding phrase-searching capabilities; and creating a thesaurus-like feature which suggests related terms to add to queries.

In the fall of 1997, Doug reduced his commitment at Excite to part-time so that he could write Lucene, an efficient, full-featured text search engine written in Java. In early 1998 he returned to Excite full-time for two more years. Lucene sat on the shelf for much of that time, and was made open-source in the spring of 2000.

Lucene quickly became recognized as the leading server-side searching solution for Java, and attracted several other open source developers, eager to help refine the Lucene codebase.

In the fall of 2001, Lucene joined the Apache Jakarta Project, where the product is maintained by a team of volunteer developers.

Doug now works for Grand Central, a web services network. In his spare time he still tries to help out with Lucene.

Please do not email Doug directly about Lucene. Instead use the Jakarta-Lucene mailing lists.