Lucene-based search (i.e. Elasticsearch, CloudSearch, etc.) strikes me as overly complex from a dev's perspective. The indexing and search processes don't seem to have enough sensible defaults and that's to speak nothing of cluster configuration and management, memory issues, etc.
In general, there's too much of a requirement to understand Lucene's implementation details in order to use it effectively, and I'm just not sure why the process of building a search feature needs to be so difficult.
Good search is difficult! But, as there are more and more users, more and more information and documentation is available. And over time the documentation will also get better.
I learned a lot from this article, in just a few minutes I improved my searches to be more precise. And that's kinda cool for me who has absolutely no knowledge about Lucene :)
In general, there's too much of a requirement to understand Lucene's implementation details in order to use it effectively, and I'm just not sure why the process of building a search feature needs to be so difficult.