TheLadders.com Developer Blog

Here at TheLadders.com, we're big fans of Lucene -- it's fast, flexible, and easy to use. There's also plenty of documentation and lots of helpful folks on the mailing lists.  We use it in our job search and resume search, as well as a few internal applications.

For our "MyJobs" project, we were faced with a requirement to display a list of jobs that a user had applied to or saved, and in ajax-style (without reloading the page), narrow that list down as they were typing in a search term.  Since we had all this data on the client side for display anyway, we thought, hey, can we do the searching there, too?  Pretty quickly we were able to prototype a simple client-side only text index and search.  We ended up being to reuse this code in a few different areas of the website.

API Use

creating an index:

// creating an index, adding documents
var index = new LADDERS.search.index();
var d = new LADDERS.search.document();
d.add("id", 1);
d.add("text", "one two three");
index.addDocument(d);
d = new LADDERS.search.document();
d.add("id", 2);
d.add("text", "four five six");
d.add("moretext", "ten");
index.addDocument(d);
// etc...

searching:

// searching
var searchTerms =
["one", "one two", "two one", "four six", "f*", "t*"];

for (var w in searchTerms)
{
  print(searchTerms[w] + " => " + index.search(searchTerms[w]));
}

output:

one => 1
one two => 1
two one => 1
four six => 2
f* =&g\t; 2
t* => 1,2

Indexing

You can create as many indices as you like in your application.  Each document must have a field labeled "id".  The value of this field will be returned to you if the document matches your search.  Any other fields you add will be searchable once the document is added to the index.  Multi-field search is not currently supported; all fields (except for id) are treated identically.

Searching

Only "AND" search is supported.  That is, only documents that match all the words of your search will be returned, but the order in which those words appear is not important.  Simple wildcarding (*) is supported.