We have been using Lucene for a while. It is embedded in our InfoMinder product (mostly for filtering content). I was happy to find an entire Enterprise Search solution called Solr. It is an Apache project (in incubation) and seems to have some great features.
Solr is a standalone enterprise search server with a web-services like API. You put documents in it (called “indexing”) via XML over HTTP. You query it via HTTP GET and receive XML results.
- Advanced Full-Text Search Capabilities
- Optimized for High Volume Web Traffic
- Standards Based Open Interfaces – XML and HTTP
- Comprehensive HTML Administration Interfaces
- Scalability – Efficient Replication to other Solr Search Servers
- Flexible and Adaptable with XML configuration
- Extensible Plugin Architecture
There seems to be even hosted solutions for Solr.
What can you do with Solr?
By buying a box and hosting Solr on it, you may have a simple Search Appliance. This can be used by enterprises for document search in the intranet. It can also be used as the backend of a content management system or a wiki. It will be interesting to play with this tool. It is also a potential backend for lots of Search mashups.
Update: 26th Jan 07
Tim’s question about hosting made me go back and search the web. Here are some good resources I found in the process:
2 thoughts on “Solr – Open Source Enterprise Search Server”
Can you remember where you find specific hosting of solr? Can’t seem to find any providers that “specialize in Solr hosting.
Tim,
I should have remembered to put a link while I was writing. I searched a bit and cannot find any link. However,
I found a list of Public Websites using Solr(http://wiki.apache.org/solr/PublicServers) and updated the post.I will continue my search and report back if I find anything.
Thanks,
Dorai
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