Xapian - the open source search engine

Documentation

We suggest you start by reading the Introduction, which should take you from the point of downloading the code, to getting an example application compiled and running.

For a quick introduction to our software, including a walk-through example of an application for searching through some data, read the Quickstart document.

The User manual details the API which Xapian provides to programmers.

Much useful documentation is automatically extracted from the source code. Full documentation of the API is available for users, and documentation of the internals is available for developers working on Xapian itself. Finally, there is a short document about the Directory structure which is automatically generated from the source code.

If you want to learn more about probabilistic information retrieval, there's a (reasonably mathematical) introduction to the ideas behind Xapian. This document also suggests some books you might want to read.