Faceted Search with Lucene 4

Faceted search is a technique used on several ecommerce websites and search engines to allow users to refine their search results by narrowing down the scope of their queries to a category or a sub category.

The facet implementation in Lucene allows to categorize documents by categories and subcategories, then get the list of categories of the documents matching a query and also to drill down to a specific category or a sub category.

In this post, we are going to write three programs:

• an indexer
• a searcher
• an advanced searcher that narrows down the scope to a category or subcategory