When Lucene first hit the scene five years ago, it was nothing short of amazing. By using this open-source, highly scalable, super-fast search engine, developers could integrate search into applications quickly and efficiently. A lot has changed since then search has grown from a "nice-to-have" feature into an indispensable part of most enterprise applications. Lucene now powers search in diverse companies including Akamai, Netflix, LinkedIn, Technorati, HotJobs, Epiphany, FedEx, Mayo Clinic, MIT, New Scientist Magazine, and many others. Some things remain the same, though. Lucene still delivers high-performance search features in a disarmingly easy-to-use API. It's still a single compact JAR file (less than 1 MB!). Due to its vibrant and diverse open-source community of developers and users, Lucene is relentlessly improving, with evolutions to APIs, significant new features such as payloads, and a huge (as much as 8x) increase in indexing speed with Lucene 3.0. And with clear writing, reusable examples, and unmatched advice on best practices, Lucene in Action is still the definitive guide to developing with Lucene.