Solr Search Engine: Beyond The Basics

The Apache Solr search engine has become almost the default choice for adding superior search capabilities to a web application. In this talk we will go beyond the basics of Solr, and look up at what it offers and how to set it up robustly and properly for production use. We will plan and implement a document model in Solr, and look at how to index different document types with Solr Cell or index data from the web with the Nutch crawler. We will cover options for tuning queries and performance, and examine how best to use more advanced features like faceting, spelling correction and 'more like this'. Solr offers a language agnostic web service, so client examples will be in PHP and Python, but the bulk of the content will be applicable to anyone looking to work well with Solr.