Inspired by Sam Ruby, I got Lucene to search this site.. My search sample size is pretty small, but 10 milliseconds for a search on any site is pretty fast. How?

First, download the Lucene binaries.

Second, throw lucene-1.2.jar & lucene-demos-1.2.jar into your classpath or into your $siteroot/WEB-INF/lib folder.

Run a quick index of the html files you want indexed:

# java -classpath #InsertPathToAboveMentionedJars org.apache.lucene.demo.IndexHTML -create #InsertPathToFilesYouWantIndexed

And then you can run a query using the sample jsp provided w/ the Lucene download by changing the path to the index you created. Pretty simple!

Maybe someday I’ll polish up the scripts and add it to Moveable Type’s External Resources page.