How to Use Lucene Search Efficiently

Lucene search using Solr enables enterprise clients with a faster, easier, and more complete way to find knowledge and information in the key sources available within the enterprise. There are many online communities that help users to deal with issues related to Lucene search. The online community includes the Apache Lucene and Solr email forums. There are also other communities for Nutch, Tika, Mahout, Droids, and the Lucene Library ports. These communities provide answers to enterprise users in a quicker and simpler way.

Faceted search is the dynamic clustering of items or search results into categories that let users drill into search results in depth. When users understand that a particular cluster is not required by them, they even choose to skip. Each facet or result displayed also shows the number of hits within the search that matches that category. The most important advantage of using Lucene search is this concept of faceting.

Some Users use this faceting process to \”drill down\” by applying specific keywords to the search results. It is also termed as faceted browsing, faceted navigation, guided navigation and sometimes parametric search by users.

The facets are basically the list of checkboxes presented on the left of the search page. Each facet has the total count of the results displayed along with it. This way, Solr is able to provide visibility into the search results, helping users narrow down their results and focus on where exactly they find appropriate answers to their questions.

In the search result page there is also a link to \”Options\” at the top of the facet listing. This one basically allows users to turn on display of facets with zero counts. This is a clear indication on where the query has returned no results.

Solr also offers a topic cloud in the search pop-up. This is a selected set of terms sampled from the 1000 most frequent terms found in the collection of documents that are indexed. It includes the names of the contributors and committers whose names appear most often in the corpus.

Use Lucene search or Solr index search to enjoy efficient and speedy search results.