Lucene is a Java library. You can include it in your project and refer to its functions using function calls. Elasticsearch is a JSON Based, Distributed, web server built over Lucene. Though it’s Lucene who is doing the actual work beneath, Elasticsearch provides us a convenient layer over Lucene. Each shard that gets created in … Read more
This is a great question, something I have pondered over quite a bit. I will summarize my lessons learned: You can easily use Lucene/Solr in lieu of MongoDB for pretty much all situations, but not vice versa. Grant Ingersoll’s post sums it up here. MongoDB etc. seem to serve a purpose where there is no … Read more
Good to see someone’s chimed in about Lucene – because I’ve no idea about that. Sphinx, on the other hand, I know quite well, so let’s see if I can be of some help. Result relevance ranking is the default. You can set up your own sorting should you wish, and give specific fields higher … Read more
As the creator of ElasticSearch, maybe I can give you some reasoning on why I went ahead and created it in the first place :). Using pure Lucene is challenging. There are many things that you need to take care for if you want it to really perform well, and also, its a library, so … Read more
Update Now that the question scope has been corrected, I might add something in this regard as well: There are many comparisons between Apache Solr and ElasticSearch available, so I’ll reference those I found most useful myself, i.e. covering the most important aspects: Bob Yoplait already linked kimchy’s answer to ElasticSearch, Sphinx, Lucene, Solr, Xapian. … Read more