The Best Open Source Searching Platform
Erik Hatcher uses Solr should that be good enough? He uses Ruby on Rail and Solr in conjunction to support http://www.nines.org/.
So what is Solr?
In a nutshell Solr is a wrapper around Lucene which provides all of Lucene’s functionality as a web service.
Here is the description from Apache-Con
Apache Solr, a Lucene based full-text search server, with XML/HTTP interfaces, declarative specification of data types and text analysis with a schema, extensive caching, index replication, and a web admin interface. Solr is optimized for high volume low latency web traffic and has support for faceted browsing and dynamic results grouping.
Whats so great about Solr?
- Replication: Solr can copy itself and still guarantee read access. Very nice for high availability and scalability
- Language Independent: Solr makes searching with Lucene a web service, now you can access a Lucene collection in any language.
- Support for Faceted Searching: Solr provides the infrastructure for faceted search with a plug in module and open bit-sets
Where does Solr shine
Solr works well with highly structured schemes, where the data stored is know well. Solr works great as a full text searching engine, which an update capability. It doesn’t work well as a front end database, the complexity of managing the system for rapid updates is just too hard.
Nutch is another application which uses Lucene, IMHO it looks like a great tool to support unstructured search when your need to scan through and index a lot of different documents.
Red-Piranha is another project which may interest some, but I’m not sure its active any more 