NCache & Full-Text Search

By Cesar Aguirre

I bet you have used the SQL LIKE operator to find a keyword in a text field. For large amounts of text, that would be slow. Let’s learn how to implement a full-text search with Lucene and NCache.

What is Full-Text Search?

Full-text search is a technique to search not only exact matches of a keyword in some text but for patterns of text, synonyms, or close words in large amounts of text.

To support large amounts of text, searching is divided into two phases: indexing and searching. In the indexing phase, an analyzer processes text to create indexes based on the rules of a spoken language like English to remove stop words and record synonyms and inflections of words. Then, the searching phase only uses the indexes instead of the original text source.

Full-Text Search with Lucene and NCache

Why Lucene and NCache?

From its official page, “Apache Lucene.NET is a high performance search library for .NET.” It’s a C# port of Java-based Apache Lucene, an “extremely powerful” and fast search library optimized for full-text search.

NCache gives distributed capabilities to Lucene by implementing the Lucene API on top of its In-Memory Distributed cache. This way, NCache makes Lucene a linearly scalable full-text searching solution for .NET. For more features of Distributed Lucene, check NCache Distributed Lucene page.