Apache Solr: A Practical Approach to Enterprise Search

Build an enterprise search engine using Apache Solr: index and search documents; ingest data from varied sources; apply various text processing techniques; utilize different search capabilities; and customize Solr to retrieve the desired results. Apache Solr: A Practical Approach to Enterprise Search explains each essential concept-backed by practical and industry examples–to help you attain expert-level knowledge.

The book, which assumes a basic knowledge of Java, starts with an introduction to Solr, followed by steps to setting it up, indexing your first set of documents, and searching them. It then introduces you to information retrieval and its implementation in Apache Solr; this will help you understand your search problem, decide the approach to build an effective solution, and use various metrics to evaluate the results.

The book next covers the schema design and techniques to build a text analysis chain for cleansing, normalizing and enriching your documents and addressing different types of search queries. It describes various popular matching techniques which are generally applied to improve the precision and recall of searches.

You will learn the end-to-end process of data ingestion from varied sources, metadata extraction, pre-processing and transformation of content, various search components, query parsers and other advanced search capabilities.

After covering out-of-the-box features, Solr expert Dikshant Shahi dives into ways you can customize Solr for your business and its specific requirements, along with ways to plug in your own components. Most important, you will learn about implementations for Solr scoring, factors affecting the document score, and tuning the score for the application at hand. The book explains why textual scoring is not sufficient for practical ranking of documents and ways to integrate real-world factors for contributing to the document ranking.

You'll see how to influence user experience by providing suggestions and recommendations. You'll also see integration of Solr with important related technologies such as OpenNLP and Tika. Additionally, you will learn about scaling Solr using SolrCloud.

This book concludes with coverage of semantic search capabilities, which is crucial for taking the search experience to the next level. By the end of Apache Solr, you will be proficient in designing and developing your search engine.