Solr Open Source Search and Faceted Metadata Search Server

Project Information

Platform: Java servlet: any Java OS, including Unix, Linux, Windows, Mac OS X
Price: Free, open source, under the Apache License

Features

• Highly scalable Java search server
• Works with the Lucene search library
• Accepts XML documents via HTTP (a lightweight form of "REST")
• No built-in indexing robot, can use the Nutch crawler or any other URL crawler.
• Uses Lucene parsers for HTML, OpenOffice, Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, IMAP, RTF, PDF, etc.
• Field data scheme definition, also supports Lucene dynamic fields
• Custom tokenizer, filter and analyzer steps for control over indexing and query processing
• Extremely rich indexing of fields and metadata, including numbers
• Can combine fields for fulltext-type searching
• Tuned for high performance even when updating
• Supports all Lucene query syntax, including Internet Query Operators (+, -, "") and boost
• Options for custom query handling
• Can search across multiple fields
• Synonym and stopwords text files
• Spellchecker code is in test and not
• Results include highlighted match terms in context
• Relevance rank override options
• Complex and powerful results sorting options
• Faceted metadata search results
• Can group search results dynamically
• Configurable caching for fast response
• System replication for scaling and fail-over
• Web browser admin interface provides statistics, reports, and debugging
• APIs for Ruby, PHP, Java, Python, JSON, Forrest/Cocoon
• Active development and user mailing lists

Articles & Reviews

• Searching with Solr toub.us- the blog : Feb. 22, 2007 , by gary
  
  Blog entry
  about replacing an existing search engine with Solr: generally positive, with a note about high memory usage.
  
  
• Solr: Indexing XML with Lucene and REST O'Reilly XML.com : August 9, 2006, by Bertrand Delacretaz
  
  Introduction and short tutorial for Solr, with helpful code snippets and explanations.
  
  
  
• Apache Solr (PDF) ApacheCon EU 2006 presentation : June 29, 2006 , by Yonik Seeley
  
  Slides from a talk about Solr include interesting diagrams of the functional layers and processing

Examples

• CNET Reviews - very high traffic technical information site, developed much of the faceted metadata code
• CHOWHOUND - high traffic restaurant reviews and discussion site
• Internet Archive - The Web's memory site
• StubHub - Event-ticket sales site, uses faceted metadata for browse as well as search
• La Repubblica - Italian newspaper site, classified advertising search