We have been wanting a search engine at work for some time now so I started looking at Lucene. I downloaded it and got it running and doing some basic stuff but what we really wanted was something web based, ie an out of the box solution.
I suggested we try Nutch, so I spent today getting it running. Nutch itself is a piece of cake to get working, what wasn’t so easy was getting Tomcat4 working with Nutch.
After much swearing and perspiration I finally manged to get it working and it is as sweet as a nut. We indexed just over 200 word documents in a few minutes (test machine is an old celeron) and gave it a whirl. Straight out of the box solution to your search engine problems. I was very impressed. I may have more to report on this next week because we might be putting it on one of the larger servers for a trial run.