Solr Search Usage and Benefits

INTRODUCTION:

Apache Solr is a fast open-source Java search server. Solr enables to easily create search engines which searches websites, databases, and files.

Industry USAGE:
The following list shows how various companies are using Solr search right now:

NASA Planetary Data System (PDS) uses Solr to search for dataset, mission, instrument, target, and host information”

MTV Networks uses Solr to power search on a number of its websites, including TheDailyShow.com, ColbertNation.com, and SouthParkStudios.com, and as a back-end tool on other sites such as comedycentral.com”

“Flipkart is India’s leading e-commerce website. It uses Solr to power e-commerce search over it’s extensive catalogue.”

“Billigmed is a German price comparison website for pharmaceutical items. Solr is used for facetting and autosuggestion on approximately 2 Million documents.”

“Recruit.net uses Solr 4.0 for a global job search engine operating websites in 14 countries.”

“Redfin uses Solr to power near-real-time search for its in-house customer relationship management system”

“AOL uses Solr in many web properties including Autos, Travel, Real Estate, Music, Shoutcast among others.”

“Hotelclub an Orbitz company, uses Solr to power it’s geo-search queries on static pages.”

Major CLIENTS:

Solr Search has been adopted by some major logos, including the following:

FEATURES AND HIGHLIGHTS

·  PAGINATION AND SORTING

Solr is optimized to serve paginated requests where only the top N documents are returned on the first page that results in more quick response as each request only returns a small subset of the entire search results

·  Faceting

Solr faceting is one of the more popular and powerful features available in Solr. Faceting provides users with tools to refine their search criteria and discover more information by categorizing search results into sub-groups using facets.

·  Auto SUGGEST

Solr's auto-suggest features allows a user to start typing a few characters and receive a list of suggested queries as they type. This reduces the number of incorrect queries, particularly because many users may be searching from a mobile device with small keyboards.

· Spell checker

Solr can make the spell correction automatically based on whether the misspelled term exists in the index. Solr can return a suggested query that might produce better results as hint can be shown to users -s "Did you mean highlands?" if they typed in "hilands."

·  Geospatial search

Solr has built-in support for indexing latitude and longitude values as well as sorting or ranking documents by geographical distance. Solr can find and sort documents by a distance from a geo-location (latitude and longitude).

· Multilingual SUPPORT

Solr has language detection built-in and provides language-specific text analysis solutions for many languages.

· Hit highlighting

Solr’s hit-highlighting feature enables user to display specific sections of each document when the document have a significant amount of text. Most useful for longer format documents, hit highlighting helps users find relevant documents by highlighting sections of search results that match the user's query. Sections are generated dynamically based on their similarity to the query.

Benefits with Solr search:

· Performance improvements

Solr is written in Java, hence text comparison is much faster as solr is specifically
written for indexing, result comparison, and full-text searching.

· SCALIBILITY

Solr can be set up on a different server from Apache/MySQL installations and queried against remotely as it uses REST interface. This allows search capabilities to scale independently from web/database servers.

·FACETING

Faceting is the ability to categorize content using a variety of different properties. On e-commerce store, it restricts results to a given manufacturer, price range, etc. This is particularly useful for content that has a lot of metadata associated with it (lots of taxonomy terms or fields for example).

·Complex Weighting

Solr search have the ability to score results based on a number of parameters, both at the time of indexing and at the time of the search.
Example :
User have a site that provides some content for free, and some content for pay and user want to prioritize the paid content so that it gets an extra “boost” and tends to appear at the top of the search results.

·SMART SEARCHING

Solr has the ability to handle misspellings and homophones, proximity search using latitude/longitude coordinates. Hence solr can be configured for any specific type of search also.