Solr Faceting Revealed
November 30, 2009
If you are contemplating Solr for an enterprise search solution, you will want to navigate to “Faceting in Solr 1.4 Enterprise Search Server”. The article provides useful information, clear comments, and code samples. If you want more, you can buy David Smiley’s and Eric Pugh’s book Solr 1.4 Enterprise Search Server. Interest in open source search solutions is clicking upward. Keep in mind that when you buy some commercial solutions, there are training wheels, rubber mats, and EMS personnel standing by in case you need some help. Search is complex. Procurement teams will want to weigh the cost savings of an open source solution with a commercial solution that can be up and running in a matter of a day or a week or two. Information technology professionals often perceive search as a piece of cake. It’s not. But “free” is a potent concept even if the meaning of “free” is not put in context.
Stephen Arnold, November 30, 2009
Okay, listen up, people. I am reporting to the US Marines that I was not paid to write this article and point out that an over confident IT team can throw a wrench into an open source search solution when the index won’t update or the crawler can’t find new documents.
Comments
3 Responses to “Solr Faceting Revealed”
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
With all due respect, an Apache Solr search engine based solution can be up and running in a matter of minutes or hours.
Of course it’s strictly a backend but you at least get a proven RESTful API (i.e. language and platform independent) with a robust faceted ad hoc query capability built on Apache Lucene.
I’ve personally saved clients lots of annual maintenance $$$ replacing their expensive commercial search engines with Solr.
Of course, YMMV. 😉
Steve
Steve, right on — even the most self-confident IT teams can use a little help, even with Solr. But up and running in a week or two is by no means the exclusive province of commercial search solutions. With open source, you don’t have to make an appointment with a consulting team to get started — you need only to download the software, and for a little extra help, download our certified distributions — http://www.lucidimagination.com/downloads.
And, I don’t think even the Marines don’t mind a little self-promotion: helping IT teams succeed with Solr is just what we do at Lucid Imagination: our products and services can help you develop and deploy search solutions with confidence: professional training, SLA-based support subscriptions; best practices consulting; free certified distributions of Lucene and Solr; and value-add software.
I gave a talk about this very topic this morning along with Daniel Tunkelang:
http://www.jroller.com/otis/entry/faceted_search_by_daniel_tunkelang
You can imagine that the question of Lucene/Solr vs. came up. The show of hands for Lucene/Solr users was also more than interesting. 🙂