However ridiculous it might be that Apache isn't using Lucene to run their own search (and I'm not sure it's nearly as bad as this author does), Lucene remains a useful project that's deployed in several very high volume web applications, and probably a whole lot more less prominent ones. It may not always be the right tool for the job, and it is probably frequently abused, but you can't blame the hammer if the user decides to hit his nail with a rock.
