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

DisMax and eDisMax query modes


DisMax (Disjunction Max)and eDisMax (Extended Disjunction Max) are query modes in Solr. They define the way how Solr parses user input to query different fields and with different relevance weights. eDisMax is an improvement over the DisMax query mode. DisMax and eDisMax are by default enabled in our Solr configuration. To switch the query type we need to specify defType=dismax or defType=edismax in our Solr query.

Let us add some more books to our index. Execute the following command in our <solr dir>/example/exampledocs folder (books.csv is available in code downloads):

java -Durl=http://localhost:8080/solr/update -Dtype=application/csv -jar post.jar books.csv

DisMax handles most queries. But there are still some cases where DisMax is unable to provide results. It is advisable to use eDisMax in those cases. The DisMax query parser does not support the default Lucene query syntax. But that syntax is supported in eDisMax. Let us check it out.

To search...