Lucene in Action, Second Edition

Chapter 6. Extending search

This chapter covers

• Creating a custom sort
• Using a Collector
• Customizing QueryParser
• Using positional payloads

Just when you thought we were done with searching, here we are again with even more on the topic! Chapter 3 discussed the basics of Lucene’s built-in capabilities, and chapter 5 delved well beyond the basics into Lucene’s more advanced searching features. In those two chapters, we explored only the built-in features. Lucene also has several powerful extension points, which we’ll cover here.

Custom sorting lets you implement arbitrary sorting criteria when the built-in sort by relevance or field isn’t appropriate. We’ll show an example of sorting by geographic proximity to a user’s current location. ...