Apache Solr - A Case Study

With: Edwin Adriaansen

This session will introduce the attendees to Solr by a real world example. We will show how Solr enabled us to replace an existing commercial search engine in one of the most popular online company directories in The Netherlands. We'll discuss the decision making process that led the company to explore open source alternatives to their search backend in general and why Solr was chosen in particular. We will also show how using Solr extensible infrastructure enabled us to implement non-trivial search functionality such as geo-location search and complex ranking rule schemes.