Xapian
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Xapian | |
|---|---|
| Developed by | xapian.org |
| Latest release | 1.0.6 / 2008-03-17 |
| OS | Cross-platform |
| Genre | Search and index API. |
| License | GNU General Public License |
| Website | xapian.org |
Xapian is an open source probabilistic information retrieval library, released under the GNU General Public License (GPL). That is, it is a full text search engine library for programmers.
It is written in C++, with bindings to allow use from Perl, Python, PHP, Java, Tcl, C#, and Ruby. Xapian is highly portable and runs on Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, HP-UX, Tru64, IRIX, and Microsoft Windows.
Xapian is designed to be a highly adaptable toolkit to allow developers to easily add advanced indexing and search facilities to their own applications.
A growing number of organisations and projects are known to be using Xapian including Orange, Gmane, Die Zeit and the Newspaper Licensing Agency.[1]
[edit] Features
- Transactions: if database update fails in the middle of a transaction, the database is guaranteed to remain in a consistent state.
- Simultaneous search and update, with new documents being immediately visible.
- Support for large databases: Xapian has been proved to be scalable to hundreds of millions of documents.
- Accurate probabilistic ranking: more relevant documents are listed first.
- Phrase and proximity searching.
- Relevance feedback, which improves ranking and can expand a query, find related documents, categorise documents etc.
- Structured Boolean queries, e.g. "race AND condition NOT horse"
- Wildcard search, e.g. "wiki*"
- Spelling correction
- Omega, a packaged solution for adding a search engine to a web site or intranet. Omega can easily be extended and adapted to fit changing requirements.
[edit] References
[edit] External links
- http://www.xapian.org is the Xapian project website.
- Oligarchy Ltd. and Lemur Consulting Ltd. offer commercial support, consultancy and bespoke development for Xapian.
- http://code.google.com/p/xappy/ is a set of feature rich Python bindings for Xapian.
- http://code.google.com/p/flaxcode/ is a project to build a complete open-source enterprise search engine based on Xapian.
- Recoll is a desktop search tool based on Xapian.
- Search Tools for Web Sites and Intranets - some material about various search tools (articles, comparisons, etc.)
