Lucene is still great today for smaller indexes that can entirely fit in memory and can be indexed quickly on app startup. Think something like searching for a setting in Windows 10 settings, or if you had some other fixed, small data set that you wanted to allow users to do real text search without the complexity of a search service. Lucene is still helpful here because of the analyzers, stemming, etc.
But for searching data that can grow and change over time, it's hard to justify using Lucene directly anymore. Azure Search (I believe built on Lucene) is an awesome (but relatively expensive) SaaS solution that is far easier to manage than Elasticsearch.
But for searching data that can grow and change over time, it's hard to justify using Lucene directly anymore. Azure Search (I believe built on Lucene) is an awesome (but relatively expensive) SaaS solution that is far easier to manage than Elasticsearch.