Search Engine on a Shoestring: Clojure, Hadoop, Solr, and EC2

In 2006, Columbia law professor Tim Wu asked the question, “Why isn't legal research as easy as searching the web?” Out of that question came AltLaw, a free, open-source search engine for federal court decisions. With a nonexistent budget and only one full-time programmer, AltLaw built a search engine for over 700,000 documents by leveraging a powerful new programming language, Clojure, in conjunction with Hadoop for data processing, Solr/Lucene for search, and Amazon Web Services for infrastructure.

This is the story of AltLaw's four-year existence and the technical challenges that had to be overcome, including lessons learned by making mistakes along the way.

About Stuart Sierra

Stuart Sierra is an actor/writer/coder who lives in New York City. He is a member of the Clojure/core team at Relevance, Inc. Stuart is the co-author of Practical Clojure (Apress, 2010). He received an M.S. in Computer Science from Columbia University and a B.F.A. in Theatre from New York University.

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