Apache Hadoop is a software framework that supports data-intensive distributed applications under a free license. It enables applications to work with thousands of computational independent computers and petabytes of data. Hadoop was derived from Google's MapReduce and Google File System (GFS) papers.

Hadoop is a top-level Apache project being built and used by a global community of contributors, written in the Java programming language. Yahoo! has been the largest contributor to the project, and uses Hadoop extensively across its businesses.

Hadoop was created by Doug Cutting, who named it after his son's toy elephant. It was originally developed to support distribution for the Nutch search engine project.

Hadoop consists of the Hadoop Common, which provides access to the filesystems supported by Hadoop. The Hadoop Common package contains the necessary JAR files and scripts needed to start Hadoop. The package also provides source code, documentation, and a contribution section which includes projects from the Hadoop Community.

Douglass Read Cutting is an advocate and creator of open-source search technology. He originated Lucene and, with Mike Cafarella, Nutch, both open-source search technology projects which are now managed through the Apache Software Foundation. He is also the creator of Hadoop.

He holds a bachelor's degree from Stanford University.

Prior to developing Lucene, Doug held search technology positions at Excite, Apple Inc. and Xerox PARC.

Lucene, a search indexer, and Nutch, a spider or crawler, are the two key components of an open-source general search platform, which 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 important vertical domain^{[clarification needed]} of search. While it is difficult to track the total number of installations of these platforms, public announcements of the use of Lucene and its direct descendant Solr by various venture-backed startups indicate a significant level of adoption. Perhaps the most significant deployment of Lucene is Wikipedia, where it powers search for the entire site.