Search is ubiquitious. It's available on all sites, desktop applications, ... A good search engine is something essential for letting your users get what they want. There's a lot of factors that define what a makes a good search engine: speed, accuracy of the results, ...
Drupal has already a plethora of solutions these problems. There is a search module in core. We also have integration with Google Search Appliance, Custom search, Lucene, ... But most recently Apache Solr is hotter than hot and seems to become the standard replacement for Drupal's core search solution. Even more now since Acquia uses it as the core of one of its flag products, Acquia Search.
Apache Solr is a complex technology on its own. The Apache Solr Search Integration module and its accompanying installation instructions in the Drupal handbook make it very easy to set up though.
I was curious though about how this Solr thing works though. I wasn't satisfied looking at it as a magic black box: stuff goes in, magic comes out. While the official Apache Solr wiki might give you some joy, I always prefer a book since that's easier to read.
I found one published by Packt called "Solr 1.4 Enterprise Search Server".
I was a bit scared though I'd need to dust off my Java knowledge, but you can enjoy the book well enough without any Java experience. You might have to skip a few (Java oriented) paragraphs though.
The book is built up very nice. It starts to explain how to set up and configure your own Solr instance. Using a dump of the MusicBrainz.org database, you then are explained how to import your data into Solr. You learn how to define the schema, index your data using different methods like XML, CSV, Solr Cell, ... After that, you'll start exploring Solr's search capabilities: the query syntax, sorting, filtering, ...
You'll be glad to see some features implemented in the Drupal module like "More like this", "Spelling suggestion", ... covered too.
While moving on you're introduced to a lot of search related terminology like scoring, boosting, faceting, ... Enough to comprehend how to tweak Solr's config files for your own specific scenario.
In one of the final chapters there's even a (rather small) section covering Drupal and solr-php-client. Enough to get your feet wet.
If you're using Apache Solr on your Drupal site and you're interested in why and how it works and what all configuration parameters mean, this book is a great read.
In order to help promote the book, Packt Publishing has provided a free download of Solr 1.4 Enterprise Search Server third chapter: Indexing Data.
You will be delighted to know that now you can get 25% off the print copy or a 50% off the eBook version. If you buy both versions at the same time, you get 25% off the book and 90% off the eBook!
To take advantage of these discounts, enter one of the following promotion codes in the Promotion Code field in your shopping cart and click the “Update” button:
To order the print book, your code is: solr14pr
To order the eBook, your code is: solr14ebk
To order both the print and eBook together, your code is: solr14bn
The offer will expire on 25th Feb 2010.
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