lucene/xdocs/background.xml

57 lines
2.8 KiB
XML

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<document>
<properties>
<author email="husted@apache.org">Ted Husted</author>
<title>Background - Jakarta Lucene</title>
</properties>
<body>
<section name="BACKGROUND">
<h3><img src="./images/dcutting.gif" align="right" alt="Doug Cutting"/>How Lucene came to be</h3>
<p>Lucene is the brainchild of Doug Cutting (pictured), who has been working in the
field of information retrieval for over a decade.</p>
<p>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 <a href="publications.html">publications</a>
and six issued patents. Some of these technologies are now marketed by
<a href="http://www.inxight.com/">Inxight</a>.
</p>
<p>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.
</p>
<p>In April of 1996, Doug left Apple and joined <a href="http://www.excite.com/">Excite</a>.
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.
</p>
<p>In the fall of 1997, Doug reduced his commitment at Excite to
part-time so that he could write <a href="http://jakarta.apache.org/lucene/">Lucene</a>,
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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>In the fall of 2001, Lucene joined the Apache Jakarta Project, where
the product is maintained by a team of volunteer developers.</p>
<p>Doug now works for <a href="http://www.grandcentral.com/">Grand
Central</a>, a web services network. In his spare time he still
tries to help out with Lucene.</p>
<p>Please do not email Doug directly about Lucene. Instead use
the <a href="http://jakarta.apache.org/site/mail.html">Jakarta-Lucene mailing lists</a>.</p>
</section>
</body>
</document>