Prior to developing Lucene, Cutting held search technology positions at Xerox PARC where he worked on the Scatter/Gather algorithm[4][5] and on computational stylistics.[6] He also worked at Excite, where he was one of the chief designers of the search engine, and Apple Inc., where he was the primary author of the V-Twin text search framework.[7]
Lucene, a search indexer, and Nutch, a spider or crawler, are the two key components of an open-source general search platform that first crawls the Web for content, and then structures it into a searchable index. Cutting's leadership of these two projects extended the concepts and capabilities of general open-source software projects such as Linux and MySQL into the vertical domain of search.[8] In a 2017 article, Cutting was quoted with the statement, "Open source is a requirement for business."[9]
In December 2004, Google Research published a paper on the MapReduce algorithm, which allows very large-scale computations to be trivially parallelized across large clusters of servers. Cutting and Mike Cafarella, realizing the importance of this paper to extending Lucene into the realm of extremely large search problems, created the open-source Hadoop framework. This framework allows applications based on the MapReduce paradigm to be run on large clusters of commodity hardware. Cutting was an employee of Yahoo!, where he led the Hadoop project full-time; he later went on to work for Cloudera.[10]
^ Cutting, Douglass R., David R. Karger, Jan O. Pedersen, and John W. Tukey. "Scatter/gather: A cluster-based approach to browsing large document collections." SIGIR '92 Proceedings of the 15th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval. (Reprinted in ACM SIGIR Forum, vol. 51, no. 2, pp. 148-159. ACM, 2017.)
^ Pedersen, Jan O., David Karger, Douglass R. Cutting, and John W. Tukey. "Scatter-gather: a cluster-based method and apparatus for browsing large document collections." U.S. Patent 5,442,778, issued August 15, 1995.
^Karlgren, Jussi; Cutting, Douglass. "Recognizing text genres with simple metrics using discriminant analysis.". Proceedings of the 15th conference on Computational linguistics-Volume 2. Association for Computational Linguistics, 1994.
^"The Lucene search engine: Powerful, flexible, and free". JavaWorld (published 2000-09-15). 15 September 2000. Retrieved 2017-01-25. Cutting is the primary author of the V-Twin search engine (part of Apple's Copland operating system effort)…
