Neo4j Index Confusion by Nigel Small.
From the post:
Since the release of Neo4j 2.0 and the introduction of schema indexes, I have had to answer an increasing number of questions arising from confusion between the two types of index now available: schema indexes and legacy indexes. For clarification, these are two completely different concepts and are not interchangable or compatible in any way. It is important, therefore, to make sure you know which you are using.
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Nigel forgets to mention that legacy indexes were based on Lucene, schema indexes, not.
If you are interested in the technical details of the schema indexes, start with On Creating a MapDB Schema Index Provider for Neo4j 2.0 by Michael Hunger.
Michael says in his tests that the new indexing solution is faster than Lucene. Or more accurately, faster than Lucene as used in prior Neo4j versions.
How simple are your indexing needs?