How did Hounder get started?
Work on the project (formely known as search4j) started in 2005 as an ad-hoc solution to gather information about torrent files and make it searcheable. During 2006 that solution was generalized and saw its first use as a web search engine. Later in 2006 the need to have an scalable solution was obvious and the project underwent a major refactoring process in order to support clusterization. During 2007 the adaptability of the code was put to a test with a variety of deployment scenarios ranging from a 30+ machine installation serving over 200 M documents, to a small vertical search engines running on a single machine.
How does Hounder compare to Lucene?
They are two different things. Lucene is a full text search library, intended to be a basic building block for applications needing text search functionality. Hounder, while it uses Lucene, is a search engine, providing all the required components to gather and find information with minimum extra coding, and often, no coding at all.
Is Hounder still active?
Yes, developement in Hounder is quite active. There is a team supported by Flaptor mantaining and improving Hounder. New features are added all the time, and several working installations provide constant feedback.
