I really dislike the so called “Boolean Operators” (“AND”, “OR”, and “NOT”) and generally discourage people from using them. It’s understandable that novice users may tend to think about the queries they want to run in those terms, but as you become more familiar with IR concepts in general, and what Solr specifically is capable of, I think it’s a good idea to try to “set aside childish things” and start thinking (and encouraging your users to think) in terms of the superior “Prefix Operators” (“+”, “-”).

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I’ll be speaking at the upcoming Rich Web Experience conference in Ft. Lauderdale, presenting an “Introduction to Solr”, “Solr Recipes”, and “Lucene for Solr Developers”.  I’ll be tying all of these presentations together into a cohesive search/Solr track going from the introduction, to recipes for common tasks, through advanced customization of Solr.…

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Here are my ApacheCon 2011 slides for my talk “Bet You Didn’t Know Lucene Can…” :

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From a quiet start as a pet project to a giant in the industry, Apache Lucene is definitely the little (search) engine that could.  On September 18th, 2001 (at 16:29:48 UTC) Jason Van Zyl made the first official import of Doug Cutting’s Lucene project (which started in 1997 and was hosted on SourceForge) into Apache’s Jakarta project (check out the Wayback machine).

And while I wasn’t around in the beginning, I thought I would …

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Many times, clients ask us to help them estimate memory usage or disk space usage or to share benchmarks as they build out there search system. Doing so is always an interesting process, as I’ve always been wary of claims about benchmarks (for instance, one of the old tricks of performance benchmark hacking is to “cat XXX > /dev/null” to load everything into memory first, which isn’t what most people do when running their system) …

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Over the summer I served as a Google Summer of Code mentor for David Nemeskey, PhD student at Eötvös Loránd University. David proposed to improve Lucene’s scoring architecture and implement some state-of-the-art ranking models with the new framework.

These improvements are now committed to Lucene’s trunk: you can use these models in tandem with all of Lucene’s features (boosts, slops, explanations, etc) and queries (term, phrase, spans, etc). A JIRA issue has been created …

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You’re using Solr, or some other Lucene-based search solutions, … or you should and will be!  You are (or will be) building your solutions on top of a top-notch search library, Apache Lucene.

Solr makes using Lucene easier – you can index a variety of data sources easily, pretty much out of the box, and you can easily integrate features such as faceting, highlighting, and spellchecking – all without writing Java code. And if that’s …

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If you’re in the central VA, or even in the northern VA / DC area, come join us for the inaugural “Charlottesville Solr and Lucene Meetup”. Charlottesville is home to the co-authors of Manning’s “Lucene in Action” and Packt’s Solr “Solr 1.4 Enterprise Search Server” books. This area is a hotbed of search activity thanks to NGIC and DIA calling Charlottesville home, and the many gov’t subcontractors …

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I had the honor and pleasure of being invited to speak at Überconf last week in the Denver, CO area. The annual conference is organized by Jay Zimmerman of No Fluff, Just Stuff fame. Überconf has the same top-notch quality, at a grander scale – 10 concurrent tracks (woah!), full day pre-conference trainings (mobile, anyone?), food (full breakfast! that’s a REAL hearty bonus!), and …

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One of the singular qualities of search technology is its breadth: if it’s been written down (albeit digitally), you can search it, and if you can search it, you can build a search app for it. That’s part of what makes Solr/Lucene so alluring for application development — you can build it to search just about anything, for anyone, in any way. Inspiring breadth, however, can be pretty daunting to master.

How, then, can you …

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