Apache Lucene is one of the more powerful and widely used text indexing and searching frameworks available today. Even though it is written in Java, Lucene provides a straight-forward interface that can be used from any programming language without too much effort. This presentation reports on our experience using Lucene from within a Smalltalk application – we will briefly review Lucene’s analysis, indexing, and searching features, talk about adding search capabilities to a Smalltalk application in general and outline some of the design and implementation challenges we encountered in the process.