Build an
enterprise search engine using Apache Solr: index and search documents; ingest
data from varied sources; apply various text processing techniques; utilize
different search capabilities; and customize Solr to retrieve the desired
results. Apache Solr: A
Practical Approach to Enterprise Search 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 introduces you to information retrieval and its
implementation in Apache Solr; this will help you understand your search
problem, decide the approach to build an effective solution, and use various
metrics to evaluate the results.
The book
next covers the schema design and techniques to build a text analysis chain for
cleansing, normalizing and enriching your documents and addressing different
types of search queries. It describes various popular matching techniques which
are generally applied to improve the precision and recall of searches.
You will
learn the end-to-end process of data ingestion from varied sources, metadata
extraction, pre-processing and transformation of content, various search
components, query parsers and other advanced search capabilities.
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 about
implementations for Solr scoring, factors affecting the document score, and
tuning the score for the application at hand. The book explains why textual
scoring is not sufficient for practical ranking of documents and ways to
integrate real-world factors for contributing to the document ranking.
You'll see
how to influence user experience by providing suggestions and recommendations.
You'll also see integration of Solr with important related technologies such as
OpenNLP and Tika. Additionally, you will learn about scaling Solr using
SolrCloud.

This book concludes with
coverage of semantic search capabilities, which is crucial for taking the
search experience to the next level. By the end of Apache Solr, you will be proficient in designing and
developing your search engine.