In my work related to Lucene and Solr I have seen various queries. While in the case of Lucene, developer usually knows what he/she wants to achieve and use more or less optimal solution, but when it comes to Solr it is not always like this. Solr is a product which could theoretically be used by everyone, both the person who knows Java, one that does not have a broad and specialized technical knowledge, as well as programmer. Precisely because of that Solr is a product which is easy to run and use it, at least when it comes to simple functionalities. I suppose, that is why not many people are worried about reading Solr wiki or at least review the mailing list. As a result, sooner or later people tend to make mistakes. Those errors arise from various shortcomings – lack of knowledge about Solr, lack of skills, lack of experience or simply a lack of time and tight deadlines. Today I would like to show some major mistakes when submitting queries to Solr and how to avoid those mistakes.
Search Process
We hereby inaugurate part of solr.pl which is not related to a particular search engine but rather to the development and functioning of websites related to search.
Do you ever wondered what causes the search engine, on the site, to be considered good ? To answer this question we should consider how a typical process of finding desired information by the customer look like, and is there such a thing as a typical process.
CSVResponseWriter
Solr recently received another small, but worth mentioning functionality – another response format available in standard distribution – CSV response format. I decided to write a short note about it.
Solr and PhraseQuery – phrase bonus in query stage
In the majority of system implementations I dealt with, sooner or later, there was a problem – search results tunning. One of the simplest ways to improve the search results quality was phrase boosting. Having the three most popular query parsers in Solr and the variety of parameters to control them I though it will be a good idea to check how they behave and how they affect performance.
Lucene Eurocon 2010
Following the announcement by the Apache Software Foundation’s intention to abandon the organization of ApacheCon conference on the old continent, we Europeans were left with no conference under the sign of the Apache near us. But as we all know, nature does not like emptiness, and thus the company Lucid Imagination, in cooperation with the sponsors, decided to organize the first conference dedicated to Lucene and Solr – Lucene Eurocon. Due to the fact that we had the pleasure to participate in this conference, we decided to pass you a short account of its progress.