Tech Topics

Celebrating 20 years of Apache Lucene: Future

Apache Lucene turned 20 this year, and to celebrate, we've reached out to folks involved in the project to talk about its past, present, and future. In this week's blog, we're going to take a look at what the future may hold in store for Lucene. In addition to hearing from Lucene's founder, Doug Cutting, we'll also feature different Project Management Committee (PMC) members, committers, and contributors — each sharing their hopes for the future. Let's start with Adrien:

We have a good momentum around finding top hits without visiting all documents that match a query. This started a couple of years ago when we started implementing block-max WAND, and we're now working on generalizing the approach to queries sorted by field. This might not sound big, but there are so many deployments of Lucene around the world that even modest improvements have the potential to save lots of computing power! What's beyond that? I have honestly no idea. There are ongoing discussions about adding support for high-dimensionality data in Lucene, I'm curious where this will go. What I'm certain of however, is that Lucene has a bright future ahead.

- Adrien Grand, Apache Lucene PMC

Lucene's future is so bright, it has to wear shades. Let's hear what the community is looking forward to...

Visit our Apache Lucene timeline to see how it became the search engine that powers digital experiences worldwide.