Apache Solr: A Practical Approach to Enterprise Search

Apache Solr: A Practical Approach to Enterprise Search teaches you how to build an enterprise search engine using Apache Solr. You’ll soon learn how to index and search your documents; ingest data from varied sources; pre-process, transform and enrich your data; and build the processing pipeline.

You will understand the concepts and internals of Apache Solr and tune the results for your client’s search needs. The book 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 covers the end-to-end process of data ingestion from varied sources, pre-processing the data, transformation and enrichment of data, building the processing pipeline, query parsing, and scoring the document. It also teaches you how to make your system intelligent and able to learn through feedback loops.

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 to handle user queries and retrieve meaningful results. The book explains how each user query is different and how to address them differently to get the best result. And because document ranking doesn’t work the same for all applications, the book shows you how to tune Solr for the application at hand and re-rank the results.

You’ll see how to influence user experience by providing suggestions and recommendations, and leveraging other interesting features of Solr. You’ll also see how to integrate Solr with important related technologies like OpenNLP, Apache Tika, and Apache UIMA, among others, to take your search capabilities to the next level.

This book concludes with case studies and industry examples, the knowledge of which will be helpful in designing components and putting the bits together. By the end of Apache Solr, you will be proficient in designing, architecting, and developing your search engine and be able to integrate it with other systems.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Apache Solr: An Introduction
Chapter 2: Solr Setup and Administration
Chapter 3: Information Retrieval
Chapter 4: Schema Design and Text Analysis
Chapter 5: Indexing Data
Chapter 6: Searching Data
Chapter 7: Searching Data: Part 2
Chapter 8: Solr Scoring
Chapter 9: Additional Features
Chapter 10: Traditional Scaling and SolrCloud
Chapter 11: Semantic Search