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<div class="section" id="introduction-to-whoosh">
<h1>Introduction to Whoosh<a class="headerlink" href="#introduction-to-whoosh" title="Permalink to this headline">¶</a></h1>
<div class="section" id="about-whoosh">
<h2>About Whoosh<a class="headerlink" href="#about-whoosh" title="Permalink to this headline">¶</a></h2>
<p>Whoosh was created by <a class="reference external" href="mailto:matt%40whoosh.ca">Matt Chaput</a>. It started as a quick and dirty
search server for the online documentation of the <a class="reference external" href="http://www.sidefx.com/">Houdini</a>
3D animation software package. Side Effects Software generously allowed Matt to open source
the code in case it might be useful to anyone else who needs a very flexible or pure-Python
search engine (or both!).</p>
<ul class="simple">
<li>Whoosh is fast, but uses only pure Python, so it will run anywhere Python runs,
without requiring a compiler.</li>
<li>By default, Whoosh uses the <a class="reference external" href="http://en.wikipedia.com/wiki/BM25">Okapi BM25F</a> ranking
function, but like most things the ranking function can be easily customized.</li>
<li>Whoosh creates fairly small indexes compared to many other search libraries.</li>
<li>All indexed text in Whoosh must be <em>unicode</em>.</li>
<li>Whoosh lets you store arbitrary Python objects with indexed documents.</li>
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<div class="section" id="what-is-whoosh">
<h2>What is Whoosh?<a class="headerlink" href="#what-is-whoosh" title="Permalink to this headline">¶</a></h2>
<p>Whoosh is a fast, pure Python search engine library.</p>
<p>The primary design impetus of Whoosh is that it is pure Python. You should be able to
use Whoosh anywhere you can use Python, no compiler or Java required.</p>
<p>Like one of its ancestors, Lucene, Whoosh is not really a search engine, it’s a programmer
library for creating a search engine <a class="footnote-reference" href="#id2" id="id1">[1]</a>.</p>
<p>Practically no important behavior of Whoosh is hard-coded. Indexing
of text, the level of information stored for each term in each field, parsing of search queries,
the types of queries allowed, scoring algorithms, etc. are all customizable, replaceable, and
extensible.</p>
<table class="docutils footnote" frame="void" id="id2" rules="none">
<colgroup><col class="label" /><col /></colgroup>
<tbody valign="top">
<tr><td class="label"><a class="fn-backref" href="#id1">[1]</a></td><td>It would of course be possible to build a turnkey search engine on top of Whoosh,
like Nutch and Solr use Lucene.</td></tr>
</tbody>
</table>
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<div class="section" id="what-can-whoosh-do-for-you">
<h2>What can Whoosh do for you?<a class="headerlink" href="#what-can-whoosh-do-for-you" title="Permalink to this headline">¶</a></h2>
<p>Whoosh lets you index free-form or structured text and then quickly find matching
documents based on simple or complex search criteria.</p>
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<div class="section" id="getting-help-with-whoosh">
<h2>Getting help with Whoosh<a class="headerlink" href="#getting-help-with-whoosh" title="Permalink to this headline">¶</a></h2>
<p>You can view outstanding issues on the
<a class="reference external" href="http://bitbucket.org/mchaput/whoosh">Whoosh Bitbucket page</a>
and get help on the <a class="reference external" href="http://groups.google.com/group/whoosh">Whoosh mailing list</a>.</p>
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<h3><a href="index.html">Table Of Contents</a></h3>
<ul>
<li><a class="reference internal" href="#">Introduction to Whoosh</a><ul>
<li><a class="reference internal" href="#about-whoosh">About Whoosh</a></li>
<li><a class="reference internal" href="#what-is-whoosh">What is Whoosh?</a></li>
<li><a class="reference internal" href="#what-can-whoosh-do-for-you">What can Whoosh do for you?</a></li>
<li><a class="reference internal" href="#getting-help-with-whoosh">Getting help with Whoosh</a></li>
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