Solr to the rescue!

What is it?

• Search platform built on top of the Apache Lucene project.
  • Lucuene provides the "indexing spellchecking, hit highlighting and advanced analysis/tokenization capabilities."
  • Solr surfaces this through a web API.

Lucene

"Apache Lucene is a high-performance, full-featured text search engine library written entirely in Java. It is a technology suitable for nearly any application that requires full-text search, especially cross-platform."

• Screaming fast seach technology used by some familiar players:
  • Apple
  • JIRA
  • LinkedIn
  • Twitter

Solr

• Extends Lucene search engine for features like:
  • Data schema with types, dynamic fields, and keys.
  • Faceted search and filtering.
  • Geospatial search.
  • Multiple search indicies.

Hosting Solr

• Run as a standalone process or more reliably run with tomcat.
• (+) More control over configuration.
• (+) Ability to use master/slave or sharded indexes.
• (+) Ability to do server-side document indexing (vs client – Drupal – side).
• (-) Need to support it.

Hosted Solr

• The big Drupal platforms support it out of the box:
  • Pantheon
  • Acquia
• Additional Solr hosts:
  • websolr
  • SolrHQ

Integrating with Drupal

• Apache Solr Search
  • Original solr module.
  • Good API hooks and relatively easy to work with.
  • Possible to load results with 0 database requests.
  • I've committed a bit to it...

Integrating with Drupal

• Search API + Search API Solr search
  • Extremely flexible search platform with multiple backends.
    • Useful for clients that may not initially need or want to invest in Solr.
  • Also has a relatively easy to work with API.
  • Relies on entity system to load results.
    • Make sure Entity Cache is enabled!

Faceted Search

• Allow users to narrow searches with suggested keywords.
• Can also show number of results in each facet, leading to more relevant searches.
• Only surfaces categories that will return results.
• Both modules gain facet support with the Facet API module.