1. What is Apache Lucene primarily used for?
Answer:
Explanation:
Apache Lucene is a high-performance, full-text search library used for incorporating search functionality into applications.
2. Lucene creates an index of documents using which data structure?
Answer:
Explanation:
Lucene uses an inverted index, which is a data structure used to store a mapping from content, such as words or numbers, to its locations in a document or a set of documents.
3. What is a 'Document' in the context of Lucene?
Answer:
Explanation:
In Lucene, a 'Document' is an entity that consists of multiple fields. Each field has a name and textual content, and is the basic unit of indexing and search.
4. How does Lucene perform text analysis?
Answer:
Explanation:
Lucene performs text analysis using Tokenizers and Analyzers, where Tokenizers break text into tokens and Analyzers process these tokens (such as lowercasing, removing stopwords).
5. In Lucene, what is a 'Field'?
Answer:
Explanation:
In Lucene, a 'Field' represents a specific part of a Document, such as the title, body, author, etc. Each Field can be indexed and searched separately.
6. What is the role of a Lucene 'Analyzer'?
Answer:
Explanation:
An Analyzer in Lucene is responsible for breaking down text into tokens (or terms) and applying various transformations like lowercasing, removing punctuation, etc., facilitating effective text searching.
7. What is a 'Token' in Lucene?
Answer:
Explanation:
In Lucene, a 'Token' is the smallest unit of text that is indexed and searched. It is typically a word, number, or other searchable text fragment.
8. What is Lucene's 'QueryParser' used for?
Answer:
Explanation:
QueryParser in Lucene is used to convert a search query string into a Query object, which can then be used to perform a search against the index.
9. How does Lucene score documents in search results?
Answer:
Explanation:
Lucene scores documents based on their relevancy to the search query, taking into account factors like term frequency, inverse document frequency, field norm, etc.
10. What type of search capability does Lucene provide?
Answer:
Explanation:
Lucene provides various types of search capabilities including full-text search, numeric range search, and even geospatial search, among others.
11. What is Lucene's 'IndexWriter' class used for?
Answer:
Explanation:
The IndexWriter class in Lucene is used for writing data to the index. It handles the creation of new documents and updating or deleting existing ones.
12. Can Lucene handle fuzzy searches?
Answer:
Explanation:
Lucene can handle fuzzy searches, which allow for matching of terms that are similar but not identical to the search term, using the FuzzyQuery class.
13. What is a 'BooleanQuery' in Lucene?
Answer:
Explanation:
A BooleanQuery in Lucene is a composite query that combines multiple other queries using Boolean operators like AND, OR, and NOT.
14. How does Lucene support phrase searching?
Answer:
Explanation:
Lucene supports phrase searching, where a sequence of words is searched exactly as it appears, using the PhraseQuery class.
15. What is the purpose of Lucene's 'TermVector'?
Answer:
Explanation:
TermVectors in Lucene are used to store additional information about how terms occur in documents, such as their frequency, positions, offsets, etc., which can be useful for certain types of analysis.
16. What is the advantage of using a 'MultiFieldQueryParser' in Lucene?
Answer:
Explanation:
The MultiFieldQueryParser class in Lucene allows a single query to be executed across multiple fields, making it possible to search for a term in more than one field at the same time.
17. How are updates handled in a Lucene index?
Answer:
Explanation:
In Lucene, updates to an indexed document are handled by first deleting the old document and then adding the new version of the document.
18. Can Lucene index binary data?
Answer:
Explanation:
Lucene can index binary data, but it needs to be converted or encoded into a text representation, as Lucene is fundamentally a text search engine.
19. What is the role of Lucene's 'Similarity' class?
Answer:
Explanation:
The Similarity class in Lucene is used to score documents based on how closely they match a given query, influencing the search results ranking.
20. In Lucene, what is 'IndexSearcher' used for?
Answer:
Explanation:
The IndexSearcher class in Lucene is used to search for documents in an index. It executes queries against the index and retrieves matching documents.
21. What is a 'WildcardQuery' in Lucene?
Answer:
Explanation:
A WildcardQuery in Lucene allows for the use of wildcard characters such as '*' (any character sequence) and '?' (any single character) in search terms.
22. How does Lucene handle text stemming?
Answer:
Explanation:
Lucene handles text stemming, which is reducing words to their root form, by using external libraries like Snowball. Stemming is not built-in in Lucene but can be implemented through custom Analyzers using these libraries.
23. What is 'Near Real-Time Search' in Lucene?
Answer:
Explanation:
Near Real-Time Search in Lucene refers to the capability of searching in an index that is updated in near real-time, allowing users to search for content that has been recently indexed with minimal delay.
24. In Lucene, what does the 'Commit' operation do?
Answer:
Explanation:
The 'Commit' operation in Lucene writes any changes made to the index (such as adding, updating, or deleting documents) from memory to disk, making them permanent and searchable.
25. Can Lucene be integrated with big data technologies like Hadoop?
Answer:
Explanation:
Lucene can be integrated with big data technologies like Hadoop to handle the indexing and searching of large datasets stored in Hadoop's file system, combining Lucene's search capabilities with Hadoop's scalability.