Apache Solr is a search platform focused on delivering enterprise class, high performance search functionality.
It can be used to power search features within any data driven websites. Solr can be integrated with any application or website because it communicates using standard formats such as HTTP, XML and JSON.
Solr's REST-like APIs make it easy to use from virtually any programming language.
Its major features are:
- full-Text search capabilities
- faceted search
- spatial search
- distributed search
These features are of great significance because search is not just about returning result-set objects that match words in a user query. It includes processing of the original text into indexed terms followed by relevancy ranking and returning results in special grouping formats such as facets, clusters and many more.
Also, Solr has the capability of distributed searching, fault-tolerance and load balancing and therefore it is extensively used in a big-data ecosystem.
With the increase in number of online users, application scalability and reliability is of prime importance. Solr is proven in terms of reliability, scalability, and speed.
It is such an engine with which inbound traffic can be increased, through ensuring that search results and ad-hoc combinations of search terms are most desirably exposed for public Web searching.
Apache Solr now supports several types of joins and grouping options that can be extensively used when there is a need of normalization to preserve documents relationship.
It has an optional column-oriented storage called docValues that is the way to build the forward index.
And out of box, it gives the developer, the flexibility to have their own complex data types and storage, ranking, and
analytics functions.
The Apache Lucene's libraries that Apache Solr has in its core are widely used in most of the
scalable websites such as Twitter, LinkedIn and other social networking sites, etc. Such websites are
estimated to manage up-to 12000 queries per second and with Indexing speed of 220GB/hour for 4k
documents.
Ease of use, relevance, find-ability and recommending other results are always the important aspects of search technology. Apache Solr with its text analyzing capabilities such as Automatic term stemming, spell-correction, synonym search, multi-lingual analysis etc., enable customers to enter free text search and retrieve products of their interest.
Finally, it is the most widely deployed search platform, and is supported and developed by a large community of open source developers and committers.