A recent Slashdot poster asked for Solr-powered “Attractive Open Source Search Interfaces”. First, for some inspiration on what you might want to have in a search user interface, check out Peter Morville’s excellent set of screenshot examples. One of my favorite examples is, of course, from the library space. Morville showcases the NCSU library system site on one of his sets:
Several Solr-powered open source faceted navigation search systems for libraries have been built with various technologies: Blacklight (Ruby on Rails), VUFind (PHP), Kochief (Django), MULtifacet (Drupal). The question is, how general purpose are these user interfaces for non-library uses? In theory they could all be purposed in this way, as every library really has a need to customize the UI. Blacklight, for example, is written up in the Solr 1.4 book (by Smiley and Pugh) with a showcase that works on their MusicBrainz example.
The tough part of generalizing a search UI is that what we all really want is a custom-for-us UI, one that is as flexible as our imagination. And it must fit pragmatically into the technology constraints of our operation. For some, Ruby on Rails is the ONLY way to go, for others a Java-based UI tier is the only technology that fits.
Here are some pointers to various other UI technologies on top of Solr:
- Solritas – Apache Velocity templating. Available, with some config, in Solr 1.4.
- Solr Flare - a proof of concept RoR UI plugin, does Ajax suggest, faceted navigation, saved (session-based) searches, and more.
- AJAX Solr – JavaScript, purely client-side widgets
These are covered a bit with screenshots in my EdUI presentation “Solr Flair: Search User Interfaces Powered by Apache Solr”.
What other open source UI frameworks live on top of Solr? Add a comment with a pointer!
I think there is a lot of untapped potential in search UI design. I’ve actually been working on developing a set of search UX patterns for solr (and other platforms). We’ll be publishing more about our patterns in the near future, but you can get the idea at http://TwigKit.com and http://blog.TwigKit.com
January 14, 2010 07:37 — Tyler Tate
The best known Drupal integration module, which is used in many libraries as well, is http://drupal.org/project/apachesolr
Here’s a non-library example of it in action: http://www.whitehouse.gov/search/site/freedom
January 15, 2010 04:16 — Robert Douglass
Summon (Serials Solutions) makes interesting use of Solr in the UI with both AND and OR facets, include/exclude values, date sliders and more. One of the libraries that has it publicly available is Dartmouth: http://dartmouth.summon.serialssolutions.com/ There was talk of open-sourcing that UI which is Ruby on Rails based sitting on top of a Java API which while not open-source, shows in the docs great ideas for raising the usability of Solr: http://api.summon.serialssolutions.com/help/api/ (see the use of commands)
April 27, 2010 11:08 — Jayson Minard
A Tapestry module/service with SOLR integration would be nice ….
March 22, 2011 05:37 — Toby
Color. Color is king. One (of many) suggestions: Suggest to the user to use a “color module” which can assign a color search behavior. Results can be multiple bands. Further? See Buzans mind maps. Leave American self-loathing in the circular file. We are not dumb. Use color. Last note: Women “prefer” color. 70% of campuses are occupied by women. Signed -a man.
December 23, 2011 21:16 — jpeek345