Presentation at FOSSETCON 2015 http://www.fossetcon.org/2015/sessions/getting-started-solr-open-source-search-platform-0 Solr is a very popular open source search engine which builds upon the capabilities of Lucene. It's the perfect tool to index loads of text and make it easily searchable. And it's very fast! Powerful features such as facets, typeahead, and "did you mean" help your users to quickly navigate through a very large dataset and find what they're looking for. A REST-style JSON interface makes it language-agnostic, you can even work with it straight from the command line using curl! A flexible plugin mechanism lets you augment your searches with complementary tools such as rich document parsing, text analysis, or your own custom code. In this session, learn the basics of making your content searchable with Solr.

1. Getting Started with Solr
an open source search platform
Travis Carlson
http://tcarlson.systems

2. Search Engine Concepts
● Documents & Fields
● Inverted Index
● Analysis / Tokenization
● Precision vs. Recall
● Faceting

3. Document Model
Solr indexes documents which contain fields
(like a NoSQL database)

4. Diagram from https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/SearchKitConcepts/searchKit_basics/searchKit_basics.html
Inverted Index

5. Diagram from https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/SearchKitConcepts/searchKit_basics/searchKit_basics.html
How is it so fast?

6. Analysis / Tokenization

7. Index Query
Analysis / Tokenization

8. Precision vs. Recall
There is generally a tradeoff to be made
between false positives and false negatives

9. Precision vs. Recall

10. Faceting

11. Let’s take a tour

12. Getting Started
Start up Solr and create a new “core”
./bin/solr start
./bin/solr create -c films -d basic_configs
Customize the schema for our document type
edit server/solr/films/conf/schema.xml
./bin/solr restart
Import our documents
./bin/post -c films example/films/films.json
Open the Admin UI to run some test searches
open http://localhost:8983/solr/#/films/query
<field name="name" type="text_en"/>
<field name="directed_by" type="text_general" multiValued="true"/>
<field name="initial_release_date" type="tdate"/>
<field name="genre" type="text_en" multiValued="true"/>
<field name="genre-facet" type="string" multiValued="true" stored=”false”/>
<copyField source="genre" dest="genre-facet"/>

13. Example Searches
Directed by Steven Spielberg or John Singleton:
http://localhost:8983/solr/films/select?q=directed_by%3A(spielberg+OR+singleton)&fl=name
Faceted by genre:
http://localhost:8983/solr/films/select?q=*%3A*&facet=true&facet.field=genre-facet&fl=id
Thriller movies since 2010:
http://localhost:8983/solr/films/select?q=genre%3Athriller+AND+initial_release_date%3A%5B2010-01-01T00%3A00%3A00Z+TO+NOW%5D

14. APIs make things easier
SolrClient solr = new HttpSolrClient("http://localhost:8983/solr/films");
SolrQuery query = new SolrQuery();
query.setQuery("directed_by:(spielberg OR singleton)");
query.setFields("name");
SolrDocumentList list = solr.query(query).getResults();

15. Going Further
● Custom Request Handlers
● Field Boosts
● Matching Excerpts (highlighting)
● Auto-suggest / Spellcheck / “Did you mean”
● “More like this”
● Geospatial queries

16. Going Further
Download
http://lucene.apache.org/solr/
Reference Guide
https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/solr

17. Open Source
http://wiki.apache.org/solr/HowToContribute
svn checkout http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/lucene/dev/trunk
Apache License, Version 2.0
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SOLR