Apache Solr is a fast, scalable, modern, open source, and easy-to-use search engine. It allows you to develop a professional search engine for your ecommerce site, web application, or back office software. Setting up Solr is easy, but configuring it to get the most out of your site is the difficult bit.

The Solr 3.1 Cookbook will make your everyday work easier by using real-life examples that show you how to deal with the most common problems that can arise while using the Apache Solr search engine. Why waste your time searching the Internet for solutions when you can have all the answers in one place?

This cookbook will show you how to get the most out of your search engine. Each chapter covers a different aspect of working with Solr from analyzing your text data through querying, performance improvement, and developing your own modules. The practical recipes will help you to quickly solve common problems with data analysis, show you how to use faceting to collect data and to speed up the performance of Solr. You will learn about functionalities that most newbies are unaware of, such as sorting results by a function value, highlighting matched words, and computing statistics to make your work with Solr easy and stress free.

This practical guide shows you how to get the most out of Apache Solr 3.1 with recipes that show you how to improve your search engine’s performance, analyze data quickly and efficiently, and customize the search server with your own modules.

What you will learn from this book :

Index data in different formats and forms

Use the Solr administration panel to discover the most commonly searched for information

Learn how to use different data grouping techniques

Improve your Solr deployment performance

Create and use your own Apache Solr modules

Configure your cache to cater for changes in your data

Import data using the Data Import Handler and delta query

Query Solr to search for phrases, sort results by different fields, and search geographical points

Create new applications that use Solr

Reduce the size of your index for faster searching

Approach

This book is part of Packt’s Cookbook series; each chapter looks at a different aspect of working with Apache Solr. The recipes deal with common problems of working with Solr by using easy-to-understand, real-life examples. The book is not in any way a complete Apache Solr reference and you should see it as a helping hand when things get rough on your journey with Apache Solr.