Web / Apache Lucene Interview questions

Define a Lucene Segment?

A segment is a self-contained, immutable mini-index. A full Lucene index is just a collection of segments plus a small commit file listing which ones are current.

Every time IndexWriter flushes buffered documents, it writes a brand-new segment rather than editing an existing one - segments, once written, are never modified in place. Deletes are handled with a separate "live docs" bitset marking which documents in a segment are still visible, rather than rewriting the segment itself.

Over time, small segments accumulate and get combined by background merges into fewer, larger segments, which keeps search fast and reclaims space from deleted documents.

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A Lucene segment is: A mutable in-place editable file

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A self-contained, immutable mini-index

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A single Document object

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How does Lucene mark a document as deleted within a segment? It immediately rewrites the segment file

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It flags it in a "live docs" bitset

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It deletes the whole segment

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Define a Lucene Segment? How does Lucene score documents (TF-IDF vs BM25)? What is a TokenFilter in Lucene? What is a Lucene Directory? What is a Term in Lucene? Why do we use Analyzers with different tokenization strategies? What is a Lucene Document? What is a Tokenizer in Lucene? What is the purpose of the IndexSearcher class? What are the different types of Field in Lucene? Describe the role of the QueryParser in Lucene? List common built-in Analyzers in Lucene? What is the difference between StringField and TextField? What is the difference between IndexWriter and IndexWriterConfig? What is Apache Lucene? What is an inverted index in Lucene? What are Fields in a Lucene Document? What is an Analyzer in Lucene? What is the purpose of the IndexWriter class? When should you use StandardAnalyzer vs a custom Analyzer?

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