Lucene: the core searching classes

IndexSearcher

 

IndexSearcher is to searching what IndexWriter is to indexing: the central link to the index that exposes several search methods. You can think of IndexSearcher as a class that opens an index in a read-only mode. It requires a Directory instance, holding the previously created index, and then offers a number of search methods, some of which are implemented in its abstract parent class Searcher; the simplest takes a Query object and an int topN count as parameters and returns a TopDocs object.

 

Directory dir = FSDirectory.open(new File("/tmp/index"));
IndexSearcher searcher = new IndexSearcher(dir);
Query q = new TermQuery(new Term("contents", "lucene"));
TopDocs hits = searcher.search(q, 10);
searcher.close();

 

Term

 

A Term is the basic unit for searching. Similar to the Field object, it consists of a pair of string elements: the name of the field and the word (text value) of that field. Note that Term objects are also involved in the indexing process. However, they’re created by Lucene’s internals, so you typically don’t need to think about them while indexing. During searching, you may construct Term objects and use them together with
TermQuery:

Query q = new TermQuery(new Term("contents", "lucene"));
TopDocs hits = searcher.search(q, 10);

 

Query

 

Lucene comes with a number of concrete Query subclasses. So far in this chapter we’ve mentioned only the most basic Lucene Query: TermQuery. Other Query types are BooleanQuery, PhraseQuery, PrefixQuery, PhrasePrefixQuery, TermRangeQuery, NumericRangeQuery, FilteredQuery, and SpanQuery.

 

 

TopDocs

 

The TopDocs class is a simple container of pointers to the top N ranked search results—documents that match a given query. For each of the top N results, TopDocs records the int docID (which you can use to retrieve the document) as well as the float score.