Lucene is a very nice, robust and flexible search engine. The ways you can benefit from Lucene varies from small library system to a large e-commerce portal. To unleash Lucene, you either have to use Lucene ported to your favorite language or install Solr and let Solr handle communication with Lucene. Here we are going to install Solr on a Gentoo Linux box with Tomcat as the servlet container. To get started, install Tomcat using: # emerge tomcat Default Tomcat configuration reserves the port 8080 for Tomcat which is fine unless you have another service running on that port. Now let's download Solr: ~ $ mkdir solr ~ $ cd solr