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

Filter queries and their benefits


Filter queries are used to put a filter on the results from a Solr query without affecting the score. Suppose we are looking for all books that are in stock. The related query will be q=cat:book AND inStock:true.

http://localhost:8080/solr/collection1/select/?q=cat:book%20AND%20inStock:true&fl=id,name,price,author,score,inStock&rows=50&defType=edismax

Another way to handle the same query is by using filter queries. The query will change to q=cat:book&fq=inStock:true.

http://localhost:8080/solr/collection1/select/?q=cat:book&fl=id,name,price,author,score,inStock&rows=50&fq=inStock:true&defType=edismax

Though the results are the same, there are certain benefits of using filter queries. A filter query stores only document IDs. This makes it very fast to apply filters to include or exclude documents in a query. A normal query on the other hand has a complex scoring function causing reduced performance. Scoring or relevance calculation...