Book Image

Apache Solr Beginner's Guide

By : Alfredo Serafini
Book Image

Apache Solr Beginner's Guide

By: Alfredo Serafini

Overview of this book

<p>With over 40 billion web pages, the importance of optimizing a search engine's performance is essential.<br /><br />Solr is an open source enterprise search platform from the Apache Lucene project. Full-text search, faceted search, hit highlighting, dynamic clustering, database integration, and rich document handling are just some of its many features. Solr is highly scalable thanks to its distributed search and index replication.<br /><br />Solr is written in Java and runs as a standalone full-text search server within a servlet container such as Apache Tomcat or Jetty. Solr uses the Lucene Java search library at its core for full-text indexing and search, and has REST-like HTTP/XML and JSON APIs that make it usable with most popular programming languages. Solr's powerful external configuration allows it to be tailored to many types of application without Java coding, and it has a plugin architecture to support more advanced customization.<br /><br />With Apache Solr Beginner's Guide you will learn how to configure your own search engine experience. Using real data as an example, you will have the chance to start writing step-by-step, simple, real-world configurations and understand when and where to adopt this technology.<br /><br />Apache Solr Beginner's Guide will start by letting you explore a simple search over real data. You will then go through a step-by-step description that gives you the chance to explore several practical features. At the end of the book you will see how Solr is used in different real-world contexts.<br /><br />Using data from public domains like DBpedia, you will define several different configurations, exploring some of the most interesting Solr features, such as faceted search and navigation, auto-suggestion, and rich document indexing. You will see how to configure different analysers for handling different data types, without programming.<br /><br />You will learn the basics of Solr, focusing on real-world examples and practical configurations.</p>
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Apache Solr Beginner's Guide
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Looking at the Solr customizations


This is the last chapter, and will be a little different from the previous ones, because it will involve writing code for some of our examples.

Once we learn how to manage the basic components and typical configurations for common Solr usage, it's important to have an idea of where to start for specific customizations—even if it's obvious that in most cases we will not need them at all.

The following will be the main topics:

  • Detecting and managing language: We will start with what we call an advanced configuration, more than an actual customization which includes language recognition and managing multiple languages. I decided to put this argument in this chapter because the configurations that depend on language require specific analysis, testing, and libraries. So, we will introduce some of the libraries that can be used for this task; but our examples will only be a beginning.

  • In order to test language analysis chains, we will see that it's possible to...