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Solr - The powerful enterprise search for your website
For TYPO3 and all other websites wanting to convince with their search
Searching a website is especially important when the website contains a lot of information organized in a nested menu of pages, subpages and blog posts with text, graphics and documents. At the same time, visitors are used to getting perfect search results at lightning speed through search engines like Google - Solr is a search engine for websites that delivers suitable results quickly and includes many Google-style functions. And this is not a matter of course, because the search function of websites is often unhelpful, inaccurate and sometimes does not provide any or no suitable results. This can be very frustrating for users and has little to do with usability. In the worst case, it can drive away customers.
If you want to offer a search function on your (TYPO3) website, you can rely on the established Apache Solr search solution and we will take care of the technical implementation for you – just contact us!
Apache Solr is an open source software from the Apache Software Foundation. Written in Java, the search solution runs outside the websites that use it, on its own server such as Tomcat or Jetty. In TYPO3, the instance communicates with the search engine server via extensions and quickly delivers high-quality search results.
Solr is based on Lucene technology. Lucene, which is also free open source software, is a full-text search software library written in Java. A library acts as an archive for subroutines or auxiliary modules that can be used through interfaces. Lucene creates an index from files and an ordered list from search results. Solr is based on this same technology, but is a standalone server version of Lucene with additional features. Solr has REST-like interfaces, communicates via HTTP/XML, and can capture a wide variety of data formats.
Thus, Solr can be used to create appealing search solutions that can be used in content management systems such as TYPO3 or WordPress. We use a custom-fit Solr solution for TYPO3 and can also integrate the search engine into other CMS and websites, where the search engine is just as powerful and fast. The functions of Apache Solr are diverse and can be adapted to individual needs – let's take a look at the numerous features that Solr can do.
When entering a search
- Spell check & spelling suggestions: Suggestions of alternative terms in case of potential input errors – suggestions result from existing content or other sources such as Duden
- Auto-completion: when entering a search, suggestions from the indexed content are automatically displayed to complete the term
- Stem word recognition & language analysis: word stem is recognized so that all possible forms of the term are also searched for
- Stop words: it is possible to specify terms that do not appear in the search results
- Synonym search: different terms that mean the same thing are equated in the search and results are returned for all synonyms, e.g. roll - bun
In the search result
- Faceting: list with search results is sorted by categories – allows filtering
- Sorting by relevance: search results can be weighted according to where a search term is placed, e.g. headline or body text
- Refinement of search results: by e.g. favoriting current content
- Hit highlighting: search term can be seen easily and intuitively by highlighting, e.g., in color or bold font
- Permissions: restricted content does not appear in search results
- Upgrading of search results: similar to paid results (e.g. Google), content can be placed at the top of the results list
- Multilingualism & geo-based search functions: Display hits only in appropriate language or matching the searcher's region
Besides the obvious benefits Solr has for searchers, the search engine is also an impressive solution from a technical point of view, offering configurable and extensible text analysis and caching features, among others. There is an administrative interface for users, logs that can be viewed and much more. Read more highlights that Apache Solr has to offer in the next section.
Powerful & Fast
Solr is able to search through thousands of pages in milliseconds and deliver matching results. This is because, unlike indexed search, Solr uses the so-called index queue, which already observes the changes in the backend and does not wait for the updated version in the frontend, thus enabling prompt indexing. Furthermore, large data volumes and high traffic volumes are no problem for Solr. Transaction logs are used to avoid data loss, and to remain powerful and fast even with many search queries at the same time, Solr relies on load balancing. Without question, the Apache Solr Search Engine is therefore particularly suitable for large, extensive enterprise websites, which also have to perform stably with a large volume of traffic.
Skalable
A major advantage of Solr is demonstrated by its outstanding scalability. Thus, computing power can be easily adjusted, while Solr ensures an even distribution of network traffic. Distributed systems can be operated fault-tolerantly with Solr, and when expanding capacities, the content does not have to be indexed from the beginning. A user interface makes it easy to keep track of the architecture. Solr's search solution is modular and can be expanded by an almost infinite number of servers, allowing the search engine to easily meet increasing search capacity requirements. The flexible deployment options make Solr a perfect search solution for growing projects or Big Data.
Search for different sources & formats
Solr can search and index a wide variety of formats and data sources, truly listing all potentially relevant hits for the searcher. This helps break down data boundaries and combine and coordinate information, which can add great value. File formats and sources for Solr search can include:
- Web pages of any kind (regular pages, blog articles, product pages, etc.)
- Documents/binary data (PDFs, PowerPoint, Word, Excel – extracted by Apache Tika)
- Graphics (JPEG, PNG, etc.)
- Geodata
- Databases
A search engine is a program or application used to search content of any kind for a specific search term. After the search query, the search results are usually presented in a list of links. Search engines exist online, which can be called up in the browser as a stand-alone website, e.g. Google, DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, integrated into websites as well as locally in programs or other offline applications.
The three essential tasks of a search engine are:
- Searching & indexing of content as well as index maintenance (on the web with the help of crawlers)
- Process search queries & find hits by a specific search algorithm
- Prepare & present results for the searcher
A full text search takes into account the complete search term without listing results only for individual words or groups of words in the search input, it also analyzes all existing content in the search for hits. In contrast, metasearch only analyzes document metadata, which can provide enough information about content if the metadata is well maintained, and the smaller text size makes metasearch faster. For a speed advantage, many full-text search engines use an index.
The indexed_search is the integrated TYPO3 search function, which can be implemented without much effort and works well and solid for small websites with only a few pages. As a pure full text search only the exact terms in the entered order will be found and nothing else. For small websites it has to be checked anyway if a search function is useful at all. For more complex websites, Indexed Search would take a lot of time to search and slow down the system.
Index-based search engines are the largest group of search engines on the Internet, and include Google and Bing, for example. In these search engines, programs called crawlers continuously search websites for their content and create an index, which is a kind of table of contents for content on the Internet and with which the search engines can usually deliver search results in milliseconds.
Contact us
You too would like to use the fast and powerful Solr search solution for your web presence? – We will help you with the implementation of the search on your website. Just contact us for a non-binding offer!
