MySolr

My name is Ed Ng.  I’m a software engineer with a decade of experience building software from client-server/desktop application to web based implementation.  I have a lot of experience in search technology includingSolr/Lucene, Endeca and Ultraseek.  I saw a lot changes in the IT scene in the past 10 years.  ERP, CRM and  E-Commerce used to be hot until the .com bombs.  Now, search is hot with Google leading the way.  However, Google is not the answer to everything when it comes to enterprise search.  Many retail companies and manufacturers have rigid requirements on search technology.  They can not live with an inflexible search engine that only focus on handling unstructured text.  They need control over how search is done.  Flexibility and customization is key to these companies.  There are quite a few vendors out there who provide solutions to them.  Some came and go (EasyAsk, FAST..etc) and some stay strong (Endeca).  Commercial solution is great but they can be very expensive at the same time.  Smaller company may not have the budget to purchase such solution.  Good news is, there is Solr.  Solr is an open source Apache project that’s built on top of Lucene.  Lucene is the underlying technology that provides search.  Solr is a wrapper that provides all the administrative tools and extra functionalities such as faceted search.  In this blog, I will write about search technology in general and development tips in Solr/Lucene.