2012 Solr Preconference

The Solr 2012 Preconference Notes of Greatness:

How to get titles like Nature (specifically, big journals like "Nature") to appear near the top:

• exact title match fields, boost those. (left and right anchored)
• create boost fields on index for specific things (like serials, you want to boost)

Things coming down the pike on solr:

• Solr 4.0: hierarchical facets? (do any nightlies work?)
• new way of handling other languages other than CJK

Replication:

• works fine, but slower than scp for ingests.
• jrochkind: not as slower as you'd expect.
• ingest with higher mergefactor for speed, then optimize to 1 merge segment, then use on read only
• etsy: http://codeascraft.etsy.com/2012/01/23/solr-bittorrent-index-replication/

How to get started on solr?

• don't be afraid to ask on list
• don't be afraid to use jetty
• buy this book: http://www.amazon.com/Apache-Solr-3-1-Cookbook-Rafal/dp/1849512183
• look in comments, don't necessarily trust the wiki
• don't use the example, start from scratch
• lucidimagination.com : run by erikhatcher, solr conference (http://www.lucenerevolution.com/ ).
• https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SOLR
• http://lucene.apache.org/solr/mailing_lists.html

How to get data in:

• sunburnt in python ( https://github.com/tow/sunburnt http://pypi.python.org/pypi/sunburnt)
• solrmarc for marc
• rsolr for ruby ( https://github.com/mwmitchell/rsolr )

How to track results?

• google analytics
• put in specific fields for tracking what people search for and click, especially which result number.

What are people doing to present info to user? Just from solr?

• one method is to mark some fields in solr as "display only"
• hathi (per Tom Burton-West) takes user to first page of document, then allows user to search, (against a separate index)

Relevance testing:

• types of tests that should always be true (hyphenation should work this way)
• worry about adding too many "result X should appear here"
• cucumber http://cukes.info/
• talk to ndushay about stanford's use of this

Tika (http://tika.apache.org/ ) use with Solr?

• Danish Web archive used it.