Book Image

Apache Solr PHP Integration

By : Jayant Kumar
Book Image

Apache Solr PHP Integration

By: Jayant Kumar

Overview of this book

The Search tool is a very powerful for any website. No matter what type of website, the search tool helps visitors find what they are looking for using key words and narrow down the results using facets. Solr is the popular, blazing fast, open source enterprise search platform from the Apache Lucene project. It is highly scalable, providing distributed search and index replication, and it powers the search and navigation features of many of the world's largest websites.This book is a practical, hands-on, end-to-end guide that provides you with all the tools required to build a fully-featured search application using Apache Solr and PHP. The book contains practical examples and step-by-step instructions.Starting off with the basics of installing Apache Solr and integrating it with Php, the book then proceeds to explore the features provided by Solr to improve searches using Php. You will learn how to build and maintain a Solr index using Php, discover the query modes available with Solr, and how to use them to tune the Solr queries to retrieve relevant results. You will look at how to build and use facets in your search, how to tune and use fast result highlighting, and how to build a spell check and auto complete feature using Solr. You will finish by learning some of the advanced concepts required to runa large-scale enterprise level search infrastructure.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Apache Solr PHP Integration
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Faceting


Faceted searches break up the search results into multiple categories, showing counts for each category. Faceting is used in searches to drill down into a subset of results from a query. To get an idea of how facets are helpful, let us go to www.amazon.com and search for mobile phones. We will see facets on the left-hand side such as brand, display size, and carrier. Once we select a facet to drill down, we will see more facets that will help us narrow down the phone we would like to purchase.

Faceting is generally done on human readable text that is predefined such as location, price, and author name. It would not make sense tokenizing these fields. So, facet fields are kept separate from search and sorting fields in the Solr schema. They are also not converted to lowercase but are kept as they are. Faceting is done on indexed fields on Solr. So there is no need to store faceted fields.

Solarium introduces the concept of facetset, which is one central component and can be used to...