Friday, May 4, 2007

Indexing with Xapian and Omega

Continuing my sojourn to index my file system and having a web-based application to search, i came across Xapian. Xapian is an Open Source Search Engine Library, released under the GPL. Xapian is a highly adaptable toolkit which allows developers to easily add advanced indexing and search facilities to their own applications. It supports the Probabilistic Information Retrieval model and also supports a rich set of boolean query operators.

If you are looking for much simplistic stuff to use Xapian, you could use Omega, an application that is built upon Xapian.

Xapian's versatility allows you to extend Omega to meet your needs as they grow. You can download all of them here.

The installation is very easy and documented here. A complete tutorial on using Omega is available here. The only thing you need to worry about is the space available in your HDD to store the indexes.

The relevant searching is good and the default cgi application of omega is effieient enough for a basic search appliance. Make sure that your files to be indexed are in the http path ( use virtual hosts) so that you can follow the search results when you click on them







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