Another nice win for Lucene!

I know not everyone has a favourite piece of search tech, but I’m a big fan of Lucene and Solr. We use Solr all over the place at News24, and we’ve started using it on Careers24 by rolling deploying it for the job search side of the platform.

I noticed today that Twitter had done a swap of their old Ruby/MySQL search for a custom search engine built on top of Lucene and Java, and in the process managed to speed their search up by 3x.

That’s no small speed increase, and it’s also meant that their search servers can handle 10x the load, which in turn means a smaller server footprint, lower power, less heat, and way more headroom for growth.

Nice… any tech that can handle a billion daily queries is probably good enough for us….