How to Operate Lucene Search

There are many online communities that help users to understand the usage of Lucene search. The online help communities include 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 fast way. Basically, Lucene search using Solr enables enterprise clients with a faster, easier, and more effective way to find knowledge and information from sources within the enterprise.

It is important to understand the concept of faceting in Lucene search. Faceted search is the dynamic clustering of items or search results into logical cluster that allows users to drill into search results. The users may choose to skip searching entirely what is not required by them. Each facet or result displayed also shows the number of hits within the search that matches that category.

There are other options for users here. Users can choose to “drill down” by applying specific words to the search results. It is also called faceted browsing, faceted navigation, guided navigation and sometimes parametric search.

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.

In order to help users to start using the search, Solr offers a topic cloud in the search pop-up which 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 it is as simple as clicking on any one term and start reading through what the community is discussing about.

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