Introduction to Search Engine – Solr

Why people love to use Apache SOLR as search engine?

Imagine if you need to build:

1. Keyword search for more than 1 million records
2. Auto-suggestion (auto-complete) box with response time less than 1s
3. Articles indexing
4. Full text search for more 100k of articles
5. Data replication for several nodes

What tools will you use to buildup the above features?

1. Using database likes Oracle, MSSQL or MySQL? Yes, of course, it can be done. But, how about the searching performance? Compare with SOLR, database should be slower, especially when doing full text search with tone of records.
2. Using NoSQL or Document Store database like MongoDB or CouchDB? Yes, it can. But, again, how’s the searching performance comparing with SOLR? Obviously, SOLR’s searching speed should be faster.

Besides searching performance, you will find it very simple to setup and configure, maybe just need to spend you 5-10 minutes to do so. And, of course, it is open source, free to use. You can follow this blogs to setup your own SOLR, and some query examples showing how to make query request to SOLR server.