Table Of ContentDikshant Shahi
Apache Solr
A Practical Approach to Enterprise Search
Dikshant Shahi
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ISBN 978-1-4842-1071-0 e-ISBN 978-1-4842-1070-3
DOI 10.1007/978-1-4842-1070-3
© Apress 2015
Apache Solr: A Practical Approach to Enterprise Search
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To my foster mother, Mrs. Pratima Singh, for educating me!
Introduction
This book is for developers who are building or planning to build an enterprise
search engine using Apache Solr. Chapters 1 and 3 can be read by anyone who
intends to learn the basics of information retrieval, search engines, and Apache
Solr specifically. Chapter 2 kick-starts development with Solr and will prove to be
a great resource for Solr newbies and administrators. All other chapters explore
the Solr features and approaches for developing a practical and effective search
engine.
This book covers use cases and examples from various domains such as e-
commerce, legal, medical, and music, which will help you understand the need for
certain features and how to approach the solution. While discussing the features,
the book generally provides a snapshot of the required configuration, the
command (using curl) to execute the feature, and a code snippet as required. The
book dives into implementation details and writing plug-ins for integrating custom
features.
What this book doesn’t cover is performance improvement in Solr and
optimizing it for high-speed indexing. This book covers Solr features through
release 5.3.1, which is the latest at the time of this writing.
What This Book Covers
Chapter 1 , Apache Solr: An Introduction, as the name states, starts with an
introduction to Apache Solr and its ecosystem. It then discusses the features,
reasons for Solr’s popularity, its building blocks, and other information that will
give you a holistic view about Solr. It also introduces related technologies and
compares it to other alternatives.
Chapter 2 , Solr Setup and Administration, begins with Solr fundamentals
and covers Solr setup, steps for indexing your first set of documents and searching
them. It then describes the Solr administrative features and various management
options.
Chapter 3 , Information Retrieval, is dedicated to the concepts of information
retrieval, content extraction, and text processing.
Chapter 4 , Schema Design and Text Analysis, covers the schema design, text
analysis, going schemaless, and managed schemas in Solr. It also describes
common text-analysis techniques.
Chapter 5 , Indexing Data, concentrates on the Solr indexing process by
describing the indexing request flow, various indexing tools, supported document
formats, and important update request processors. This is also the first chapter
that provides the steps to write a Solr plug-in, a custom UpdateRequestProcessor
in this case.
Chapter 6 , Searching Data, describes the Solr searching process, various
query types, important query parsers, supported request parameters, and steps for
writing a custom SearchComponent.
Chapter 7 , Searching Data: Part 2, continues the previous chapter and
covers local parameters, result grouping, statistics, faceting, reranking queries, and
joins. It also dives into the details of function queries for deducing a practical
relevance ranking and steps for writing your own named function.
Chapter 8 , Solr Scoring, explains the Solr scoring process, supported scoring
models, the score computation, and steps for customizing similarity.
Chapter 9 , Additional Features, explores Solr features including spell-
checking, autosuggestion, document similarity, and sponsored search.
Chapter 10 , Traditional Scaling and SolrCloud, covers the distributed
architectures supported by Solr and steps for setting up SolrCloud, creating a
collection, distributed indexing and searching, shard splitting and ZooKeeper.
Chapter 11 , Semantic Search, introduces the concept of semantic search and
covers the tools and techniques for integrating semantic capabilities in Solr.
What You Need for This Book
Apache Solr requires Java Runtine Environment (JRE) 1.7 or newer. The
provided custom Java code is tested on Java Development Kit (JDK) 1.8 and
requires Apache Maven.
The last chapter requires downloading resources required by Apache
OpenNLP and WordNet.
Who This Book Is For
This book expects you to have basic understanding of the Java programming
language, which is essential if you want to execute the custom components.
Acknowledgments
My first vote of thanks goes to my daily dose of caffeine (without which this book
would not have been possible), my sister for preparing it, and my wife for
teaching me to prepare it myself. Thanks to my parents for their love!
Thank you, Celestin, for providing me the opportunity to write this book; Rita
for coordinating the whole process; and Shweta, Matthew, Sharon, and SPi
Global for all their help to get this book to completion. My sincere thanks to
everyone else from Apress for believing in me.
I am deeply indebted to everyone whom I have worked with in my
professional journey and everyone who has motivated me and helped me learn
and improve, directly or indirectly.
A special thanks to my colleagues at The Digital Group for providing the
support, flexibility, and occasional work break to complete the book on time. I
would also like to thank all the open source contributors, especially of Apache
Lucene and Solr; without their great work, there would have been no need for this
book.
As someone has rightly said, it takes a village to create a book. In creating this
book, there is a small village, Sandha, located in the land of Buddha, which I
frequented for tranquility and serenity that helped me focus on writing this book.
Thank you!
