Lucene has a pretty well-specified search syntax which is unlikely to change all that much, even though it's not a standard. It's not perfect, but I think it's pretty good. Overview here: http://lucene.apache.org/java/docs/queryparsersyntax.html I believe Solr adds a bit to the standard Lucene syntax for sorting: http://incubator.apache.org/solr/tutorial.html#Sorting I do have a layer of abstraction between the end-user search interface and Lucene -- you'd have to have such a layer no matter what search engine you were using. >>> [EMAIL PROTECTED] 11/27/2006 2:49 PM >>> Casey Durfee wrote: > >Just using Solr has proven to be much faster than doing the search in Solr and >then retrieving full data from another database. This also has the advantage >of making it so there's only one thing you gotta keep in sync with the ILS. >The only data that my OPAC needs to talk to a SQL database for is item-level >information, which changes too often to keep synced. > My only concern about lucene is the lack of a standard query language. I went down the native XML database path because of XQuery and XSL, does something like lucene and solr offer a strong query language? Is it a standard? What if someone developed a kick ass text indexer in 2 years that totally blows lucene out of the water, would you easily be able to switch systems?
Andrew
