Apache Solr tutorial for beginner

Behind the scene story:

In today’s word where technologies are getting changed day by day because our necessities are changing day by day. In the same fashion today where almost each website want to serve thousands of thousand visitor at any point of time with better performance and without using larger bandwidth because the max bandwidth our website will take our server cost will get increased . So it’s a matter of serving millions of customer in cost effective manner with performance. Today each website/software want to have maximum number of product on his website or software. Maximum number of products can’t guarantee maximum number of sales, untill unless each customer gets their intended product with minimum effort. The best possible ways to get the product through search. The fast and accurate your application will provide the searched result , the most chances to get your product sold . So the moral of the story is to have fast and accurate search result is the necessity of each site. This is known as Enterprise search in easy term. And Apache Solr is the key technology for it.

What is Enterprise Search?

If we need to define Enterprise search in a one line then , It would be defined as:-
Practice of generating content and making it searchable to a defined audience out of multiple enterprise type data source like database, CMS, XML,CSV etc..

Why we need enterprise search?

Below are some of the strong reason behind using enterprise search:

Some Technical Reason:

• To search something more accurate and more faster.
• Bind your search term with non key term i.e., we want our data should be matched into title, short description, long description, tags.. etc.
• I should be able to upload search domain from heterogeneous environment to my search engine.
• Search engine should be able to retrieve data from search engine through easy query.

Some Functional Reason:

• People need fast and accurate search
• Required for suggested results
• People crave simplicity like you can see how easy to search in google, msn, yahoo etc.
• Use less bandwidth for even huge search.

Enterprise search is only for website search?

No, Search is required everywhere so the same thing is true for enterprise search as well. Enterprise search can also be used in other applications except website search . For example:

• Search engines (like Yahoo, Google, Bing, MSN etc..)
• Iphones
• Android Phones
• Windows Operating System Search. You have seen in windows 8 as soon as we type any application name it starts showing results.

Why Apache Solr is best in order to implement Enterprise Search?

Implementing Enterprise Search using Apache Solr is best alternative . Below are some of the reason behind that:

• Open Source : Apache Solr is completely open source in other terms its free to use.

• Fast and sophisticated search results : As soon as we create a query it reads data from their data source that is very much optimized as well as organized into very sophisticated manner. So queried search result comes very fast.

• Highly extensible: In todays environment our application can’t be limited to certain design. We keep changing our data types, search strategies based our customer requirement. For this purpose we need to have some extension or possibility of extension so that you can implement new search logic. So this thing is available with Apache Solr.

• Highly scalable : With Apache Solr even users increases at very rapid speed still we wouldn’t found any performance issue. So scalability is best. This is because of query caching as well as output caching.

• Dynamic Content : Apache Solr search engine contain data from our database directly without any manual intervention so search results would always dynamic.

• Great Query speed : The amount of time search engine takes to return query result.

• Most Famous Industry wide: Apache Solr is very famous industry wide as well as a very active open source community is active behind it.

Above all features of Apache Solr makes it a big hit behind Enterprise Search implementation.

Which are the popular websites that uses Solr?/ Public Solr Sites

There are huge number of websites that uses Apache Solr. For example

• gov
• Instagram
• Comcast
• The Guradian
• gov
• com
• AOL
• com and lot more famous sites

What could be other alternative option to implement Enterprise Search?

The other alternative of Solr could be

• Microsoft Sharepoint
• Amazon Cloud Search
• Sinequa
• LucidWorks
• Mark Logic
• Cloudera
• Endeca by Oracle
• Exalead
• Vivisimo
• Fast
• Autonomy

And many more..

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Chandra Shekhar

GCP Architect

Chandra Shekhar Pandey is Google certified Cloud engineer, I am Magento2 Trained developer. Having huge experience in designing cloud solution. I have around 12 years of experience with world enterprise IT companies and fortune 500 clients. During my architecture design I am always caring about high availability, fast performance and resilient system. From the programmer background I have huge experience in LAMP stack as well. Throughout my carrier I have worked on Retail, E-Learning, Video Conferencing and social media domain. The motive of creating cutehits was just to share the knowledge/solutions I get to know during my day to day life so that if possible I can help someone for same problems/solutions. CuteHits.com is a really a very effort for sharing knowledge to rest of the world. For any query/suggestion about same you can contact me on below details:- Email: shekharmca2005 at gmail.com Phone: +91-9560201363

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