History

FT3 did start in 2002. Its main purpose whose to make experiments with new ideas in information retrieval. I used to work and lead the Voila search engine team at this time.

When I leave the team, I develop FT3 as a hobby to test and try ideas which we never have time to test on KE (Voila search engine service platform). I did write a complete version in C++, bigger than the current version, in particular it did support PostgreSQL, MySQL and sqlite2. I stupidly erase the source and all previous versions at the end of 2002. I did use the remaining binaries for 3 years.

During my holidays in 2005, I found time and energy to rewrite part of it. I didn't make an exact copy because I do not remember the inside of the former version. I however keep a design document which I use. The basic idea are the sames: stored everything inside the database, build both an incremental and an one shot indexer, and provide multi-languages API for search, mainly SQL, PHP and C/C++.

During my holidays in 2006, i did correct all the bugs reported on v0.2 and set up deferred indexation and binary index. Version 0.3 shows up.