Xapian

Infobox Software
name = Xapian



caption =
developer = xapian.org
latest_release_version = 1.0.8
latest_release_date = 2008-09-04
latest_preview_version =
latest_preview_date =
operating_system = Cross-platform
platform =
genre = Search and index API.
license = GNU General Public License
website = [http://xapian.org/ xapian.org]

Xapian is an open source probabilistic information retrieval library, released under the GNU General Public License (GPL). That is, it is a full text search engine library for programmers.

It is written in C++, with bindings to allow use from Perl, Python, PHP, Java, Tcl, C#, and Ruby. Xapian is highly portable and runs on Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, HP-UX, Tru64, IRIX, and Microsoft Windows.

Xapian is designed to be a highly adaptable toolkit to allow developers to easily add advanced indexing and search facilities to their own applications.

A growing number of organisations and projects are known to be using Xapian including Orange, Gmane, Die Zeit, Delicious, and One Laptop per Child. [ [http://xapian.org/users.php Users of Xapian] ]

Features

* Transactions: if database update fails in the middle of a transaction, the database is guaranteed to remain in a consistent state.
* Simultaneous search and update, with new documents being immediately visible.
* Support for large databases: Xapian has been proven to be scalable to hundreds of millions of documents.
* Accurate probabilistic ranking: more relevant documents are listed first.
* Phrase and proximity searching.
* Relevance feedback, which improves ranking and can expand a query, find related documents, categorise documents etc.
* Structured Boolean queries, e.g. "race AND condition NOT horse"
* Wildcard search, e.g. "wiki*"
* Spelling correction
* Omega, a packaged solution for adding a search engine to a web site or intranet. Omega can easily be extended and adapted to fit changing requirements.

References

External links

* http://www.xapian.org is the Xapian project website.
* [http://www.oligarchy.co.uk/xapian.html Oligarchy Ltd.] and [http://www.lemurconsulting.com/Products/Xapian/Overview.shtml Lemur Consulting Ltd.] offer commercial support, consultancy and bespoke development for Xapian.
* [http://code.google.com/p/xappy/ http://code.google.com/p/xappy/] is a set of feature rich Python bindings for Xapian.
* [http://code.google.com/p/flaxcode/ http://code.google.com/p/flaxcode/] is a project to build a complete open-source enterprise search engine based on Xapian.
* [http://www.recoll.org Recoll] is a desktop search tool based on Xapian.