Lucene: A Tacit Admission of Fail?

Posted on January 17, 2008
Filed Under /dev/null/ | 3,620 views |

Lucene claims to be a text search engine, yeah? That’s what they say:

Apache Lucene is a high-performance, full-featured text search engine library written entirely in Java. It is a technology suitable for nearly any application that requires full-text search, especially cross-platform.

So why is it when I go to the Lucene site the site-wide search is provided by:


lucene_fail

“Dog food? We don’t eat no stinking dog food!“

Comments

11 Responses to “Lucene: A Tacit Admission of Fail?”

  1. Lucene on January 17th, 2008 3:05 pm

    We have no Java on the web server.

  2. Gabe on January 17th, 2008 3:08 pm

    Whaaa????
    Apache.org doesn’t run java? Are you fricking kidding me?

  3. Tacit Admission of Stupid on January 17th, 2008 3:11 pm

    http://37signals.com/?=PHPE9568F36-D428-11d2-A769-00AA001ACF42
    http://www.postal-code.com/mrhappy/?=PHPE9568F36-D428-11d2-A769-00AA001ACF42

    It’s about right tool for the job. Google doesn’t need maintenance for example

  4. MrHappy on January 17th, 2008 3:44 pm

    I wouldn’t take anything said in the comments as the word of Lucene (whether the statement itself is in fact true or not). Anyone can post saying they’re Lucene.

  5. MrHappy on January 17th, 2008 4:00 pm

    Well this was all meant to be a tongue-in-cheek post but it seems to have excited some furour. Someone on Reddit pointed out that to be truly accurate I should have pointed to Nutch instead. They’re correct ;)

  6. Death By Chocolate on January 17th, 2008 5:51 pm

    Apache.org runs the Apache httpd server and serves static pages. Allowing every sub-project to run its own software on that server would be pretty insane. Look at how many there are.

  7. AiNoTame on January 17th, 2008 9:35 pm

    It’s a comment on how ubiquitous google is that they would give a piece of their opensource soul to a corp tho.

  8. gwenhwyfaer on January 18th, 2008 11:38 am

    Note that in the origin of the phrase, some random actor fed the dog food to his dogs. At no point did a human ever step up and eat the dog food themselves, nor did anyone at the company ever claim to feed it to their own dogs.

  9. MrHappy on January 18th, 2008 12:49 pm

    To be specific that “random actor” was Lorne Green and in the Alpo commercials he stated that he trusted the food well enough to feed it to his own dogs.

    The next big resurrection of the term came from within Microsoft in an email titled “Eating our own Dogfood” about the need for use of their own products internally.

    At no point did anyone ever interpret the phrase in its literal sense… perhaps until now.

  10. David Wilson on January 18th, 2008 3:47 pm

    Google measures a whole lot more than Lucene provides - well beyond mere full text search.

    For example the various ways Google weighs a page by popularity will often mean that the top hit for a keyword returned by a Google search will be much more likely to be relevant than an equivalent naive index maintained by Lucene.

    To accomplish similar results, the apache.org servers would need to be spider a huge chunk of the web to provide the same level of global relevance.

  11. mark on March 7th, 2008 1:39 am

    I prefer the phrases “eating our own crap” and “drinking our own champagne”, depending on the context. I only tasted dog food once it was not yummy like the wagon train makes it seem.

Leave a Reply