I joined an e-commerce company in 2000, nothing unusual I suppose. We were quite annoyed by the quality of Amazon’s search engine results compared to ours. A few years later, we reimplemented our search engine from scratch using Lucene. That’s where I learned that a good search engine is 50% kick-ass technology and 50% deep understanding of the business and the users you serve. Then I sailed different seas and joined the Hibernate team and, later on, JBoss Inc.

It must be Destiny that a few years later I worked on unifying Hibernate and Lucene. Hibernate Search’s design has been influenced by the work on Java Persistence and JBoss Seam: ease of use, domain model-centric, annotation-driven and focused on providing a unified experience to the developer. Hibernate Search brings full-text search to Hibernate application without programmatic shift or infrastructural code.

Search is now a key component of our digital life (Google, Spotlight, Amazon, Facebook). Virtually every website, every application, has to provide a human-friendly, word-centric search. While Google addresses the internet, Spotlight searches your desktop files, Amazon focuses on products, and Facebook finds people. I firmly believe Lucene’s flexibility is a key differentiator for developers building business-centric search engines. This has also influenced the design on Hibernate Search: While Hibernate Search relieves you of the burdens of indexing and retrieving objects, we made sure that all the flexibility of Lucene is accessible to you, especially when you build queries.

I am thrilled to see the rapidly growing community around Hibernate Search and nothing is more rewarding than hearing people saying: “I wish I knew about Hibernate Search six months ago.”

Emmanuel Bernard

At JavaOne 2007 I attended a presentation titled “Google Your Database!” and heard Emmanuel present his full-text search framework Hibernate Search. I had been working with Lucene, Hibernate Search’s engine, for over a year and a half and when Emmanuel invited anyone to help collaborate, I jumped. After Emmanuel’s presentation we had time only to exchange email addresses. That was the last time I saw him in person until JavaOne 2008 where we at least got to hang out together for an evening. Email and IM are amazing things.

We have two other active project committers now and I have to admit it never ceases to amaze me that four people: Emmanuel in Atlanta, Georgia; myself in a little town in Utah; Sanne Grinovero in Rome, Italy; and Hardy Ferentschik in Stockholm, Sweden, can produce and maintain a framework like Hibernate Search.

John Griffin