Intro to Solr

Apache Solr based on Lucene is one of the best open source enterprise search platforms available for building and awesome custom search engine for sites as big as wikipedia. It can be used  with any web frameworks such as CodeIgniter, Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla etc. and offers full customization according to the needs of  the website. Sites that currently use it include whitehouse.gov, netflix, sourcefourge, cnet, digg and many more.


SOLR vs Google's Custom search ?

Google's custom search is awesome undoubtedly, but if you are building a search engine for a company then you cannot just simply handover your database to Google for analysis. Here comes the solr, an open source platform which lets you customize everything and build a search engine as good as google's custom site search providing full privacy to your database.


Solr Features :

• Full-Text Search Capabilities
• Highly scalable
• Blazing Fast and optimized for high web traffic
• Supports multiple instances and cores
• XML, JSON and HTTP interfaces for request and response
• Built in Spell checking, Faceting, Geo-spatial search and Highlighting configurations

Requirements :

• A Java servlet such as Apache Tomcat or Jetty
• Java Runtime Environment preferably version 1.5 onwards

About Servers :

Localhost	Shared Server	Virtual Private Server	Dedicated Server
Can be run	Can't be run	Can be run	Can be run

Nothing fancy about it, you simply need root access to install and configure java servlet like tomcat and also installing it as a service requires root privileges. Shared servers do not offer these facilities.


In this blog, i will share the complete know-how on building a search based on Apache solr right from square one. I would post exact codes, configuration and full info related to the same in the coming days. Keep following.....




Next : Installing Solr