Acquia Announces Hosted Solr Search Product

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Gregory Heller

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November 18, 2008

Acquia Announces Hosted Solr Search Product

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During our retreat in Playa Del Carmen MEX over the summer, Jacob Singh (now a CivicActions Alumnus, Class of 2008) showed and explained to me a project he was working on to create a hosted Solr Search service for Drupal. Solr (via the Solr Integration module written and maintained by Robert Douglas) provides a method to bring very robust faceted search to Drupal sites. A few weeks ago, Jacob went to work with Acquia in order to bring this product to the masses. Read about Acquia's hosted Solr Search plans. This is exciting for a number of reasons. To quote Jay Batson, "But while many other Drupal sites could benefit from the capabilities offered by Solr, it's often not practical for them to use it. They may lack the Java expertise to deploy and manage a Java-based application - or their hosting environment may not accommodate it." Furthermore, faceted search is super user friendly, and while the Faceted Search module allows you to use taxonomy terms as facets, or combined with the CCK Facets module, turns cck fields into facets, Solr can search full text and even attachments! Acquia's service will bring high powered faceted search within reach of many organizations and companies that would otherwise not be able to set it up or support it. And in doing so, this is a big win for (Drupal) website managers and users everywhere.

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Wim Mostrey November 18, 2008
I'm not sure why you mention that "Solr can search full text". Faceted_search uses the Drupal core search module's index, which also contains all the node information. It's a shame though that neither faceted_search nor apache_solr support even basic user searching. There are still only three options:
  1. User the search module's user search
  2. Install the content_profile module to make nodes from users
  3. Use a views2-based user search
Gregory Heller November 19, 2008
I think you may have caught me... My understanding was/is that Solr can turn full text into facets, while faceted search the facets must be structured: either taxonomy terms or cck facets. However I was basing this on a very short demo of Solr, and I cannot substantiate my (mis)conception that Solr allowed for an index of keyword search terms (displayed as facets) AND structured facets. What I can substantiate is that on the demonstration site for faceted search if you enter a key word into the search, it becomes a facet than can be removed independent of other structured facets, and you can continue to add keywords, each time getting narrower results and the preview numbers next to the structured facets will get smaller. You can, of course, add a keyword that results in 0 hits, and then can remove it.
Wim Mostrey November 19, 2008
You don't even have to enter a keyword: you can go straight to http://facetedsearch.davidlesieur.com/faceted_search/results. So basically this is how you set up the environment. You can actually have a faceted_search environment without using the keyword search.