Intro to Solr

DrupalConPortland

Andrew RileyDirector of Drupal Development

@andrewmriley

Agenda

Search?WhySolr? Searching

Behindthe

Scenes

Search?

What is Search?

Search (v): to go or look through (a place, area, etc.) carefully in order to find something missing or lost: I searched the desk for the letter.

Source: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/search

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Why Users Search

•Navigation doesn't make sense

• It can be faster

•Lots of data

•Frequent data changes

•Might just be looking for something

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Search Problems

•Search accuracy

•Too much data

•Slow response

•Wrong results

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Why

Solr?

History

Solr was initially created in 2004 as an in-house project for CNET. It was open sourced in 2006 and donated to the Apache Software Foundation.

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Lucene

•Solr is a layer on top of Lucene

•Lucene is a library

•Solr stores files in Lucene format

*http://wiki.apache.org/solr/SolrPerformanceData

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Speed

Search speed is important!

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Speed

Source: Web Performance Today http://j.mp/12h8wLZ

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Speed

• Important!

• It scales well

•No database required

•Clustering & Sharding

•Netflix runs 1.2MM q/day on 4 servers*

*http://wiki.apache.org/solr/SolrPerformanceData

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Natural Results

•Stemming: Blogging vs. Blog

•Stop Word Removal: The

•Synonyms: Tissue vs Kleenex

•Highly Configurable

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Drupal Search

•Not stemmed by default

•Queries the database

•Stores tokenized words in a single large table

•Much slower to index

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VS@Mediacurr

ent

Searching

Ordering

•Score

•Comes from Lucene

•Not "out of 100"

•Bigger score first

More Info: http://lucene.apache.org/core/3_6_1/scoring.html

???

201

200

199

184

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Facets

•Users do the work

•Fixes too much data

•Native to Solr

•Requires the Facet API module

•Shopping Sites

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Behind the

Scenes

Index?

• Index contains Documents

•Documents have Fields

•Fields have Terms

•~2 minutes for updates

•Uses Lucene syntax

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Tokenizing

•Splits words and numbers"this" "is" "blogging"

•Excludes Stopwords"this" "blogging"

•Handles Stemming (if enabled)"this" "blog"

•Very configurable

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Bias

•Adjusts the order of search results

•Works on: Content Type, Fields, Comments, Promoted to Home Page and more

•Can be dynamic with custom modules.

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Recap

Modules

•Apache Solr (apachesolr)

•Facet API (facetapi)

•Chaos tool suite (ctools)

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Overall

•Search is becoming more and more important

•You want to control your search results

• If you don't provide a good search experience, somebody else will.

•Solr doesn't have to be complex.

•Solr is fast and scales.

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Thank You!

Questions?

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andrew.riley@mediacurrent.com

@andrewmriley

slideshare.net/mediacurrent