Configuring the Alfresco search engine

The Alfresco search engine is configurable and highly scalable. This section provides information about the underlying search engine and the process to configure it.

The theory behind the search engine

Alfresco supports full-text search capabilities, using Apache's powerful Lucene search engine (http://lucene.apache.org). Lucene is an open source, highly scalable, and fast search engine. Lucene powers searches in discussion groups at Fortune 100 companies, in commercial issue trackers, e-mail search from Microsoft, and the Nutch web search engine (that scales to billions of pages).

Lucene's logical architecture is such that it performs a search on a document based on the fields of text. This helps Lucene to be independent of the file format. So any kind of text (PDF, HTML, Microsoft Word documents, and so on) can be indexed as long as their textual information can be extracted.

Lucene stores the search indexes and related data in the backend...