Book excerpt: When Lucene first hit the scene five years ago, it was nothing short ofamazing. By using this open-source, highly scalable, super-fast search engine,developers could integrate search into applications quickly and efficiently.A lot has changed since then-search has grown from a "nice-to-have" featureinto an indispensable part of most enterprise applications. Lucene now powerssearch in diverse companies including Akamai, Netflix, LinkedIn,Technorati, HotJobs, Epiphany, FedEx, Mayo Clinic, MIT, New ScientistMagazine, and many others. Some things remain the same, though. Lucene still delivers high-performancesearch features in a disarmingly easy-to-use API. Due to its vibrant and diverseopen-source community of developers and users, Lucene is relentlessly improving,with evolutions to APIs, significant new features such as payloads, and ahuge increase (as much as 8x) in indexing speed with Lucene 2.3. And with clear writing, reusable examples, and unmatched advice on bestpractices, Lucene in Action, Second Edition is still the definitive guide todeveloping with Lucene. Purchase of the print book comes with an offer of a free PDF, ePub, and Kindle eBook from Manning. Also available is all code from the book.