techno.blog("Dion")

Lucene is one of my favourite opensource packages. I often find that I do need to ’script’ it so to speak, and Jeremy Rayner has shown how Groovy fits in.

He has taken some examples from Lucene in Action, and made them Groovy.

Very nice.

I have been wanting more of a personal touch from Google for awhile, and it looks like they are coming up with the goods.

Google Labs just came out with Search History, in beta.

Now you can choose to tell Google to watch over you and help out.

There are definitely privacy issues surrounding some of the more ‘out there’ personal search features (e.g. social networking ‘those who searched also searched’) but it is great to see this first step, and I look forward to more!

I always like the integrated experience with Google. When I sign up for something I don’t have to go to a DIFFERENT place. www.google.com is still the entry point and it just knows that I want a personal touch.

Nick Lothian has put up a 0.1 release of a nice Search Engine wrapper API called Argos.

About Argos

Argos is an open source (Apache licenced) Java library for accessing the search APIs provided by internet search engines. It provides a consistent, extensible and easy to use API, while supporting advanced features such as a paged request model and a simultaneous search across multiple engines.

Argos currently supports the following search engines:

• Blogdigger
• Del.icio.us
• Feedster
• Google
• Google Desktop Search
• MSN Search
• Technorati
• Yahoo

Here is an example of running a simultanous search on MSN and Blogdigger:

List<Searcher> searcherList = new LinkedList<Searcher>();
searcherList.add(new MSNWebSearcher());
searcherList.add(new BlogdiggerWebSearcher());

SimultaneousSearcher searcher = new SimultaneousSearcher(searcherList);

Iterator<SearchResult> it = searcher.search("Java");
while (it.hasNext()) {
SearchResult result = it.next();
System.out.println(result.getTitle() + " Address: " + result.getAddress());
}

A nice simple API, and one consistent one for a group of search engines.

Erik Hatcher has published a Meet Lucene online presentation (slides + audio).

The presentation is a nice introduction to Lucene. There are still a lot of people out there who do not know about this open source gem, and if you haven’t had a chance to check it out, watch this.

One of the best reasons to watch it, is that you learn what Lucene IS and ISN’T. I still find that people assume it is a web crawler, rather than a search API.