Hi David, Look at this from the other side: If You have system based on Solr (e.g. free books library) and in some cases you would like to include results from the other sources (e.g. option "include results from associated book shops") it would be simpler to have it just by enabling Solr feature than involving another framework.
Of course in a system where kind of metasearch is the main task, this approach wouldn't fit and dedicated platform is needed. I think that federated search as Solr feature is very reasonable. Especially when designed from the beginning as Solr feature and not trying to make it a universal metasearch solution. The implementation could be partially similar to existing DistributedSearch (and concerning Solr instances search part, it could use DistributedSearch directly). In basic usage it can skip some complicated parts (like collection representation) and be simple to customize. Just like Solr has support for different update formats (JSON,CSV,XML..), it could have support for different external search formats (e.g. OpenSearch). So in my example from the beginning, if one wants to include results from "associated book shop", he will just ask the shop to expose its search engine throught OpenSearch (if it's not already). Than he has to only configure suitable Adapter/Connector in Solr. With this approach the main advantage is simplicity. Including external collection in search results would require only customization of existing adapter or writing dedicated one. For users: No additional framework, No change in current search API (The adapter will handle mapping between Solr and external query/data model). The applications will be limited of course. The Solr federated query will always have lower performance than native Solr query (limited functions, lower accuracy) and could be used only in special circumstances - as a feature, not as a whole solution. Jacek Plebanek Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and Computational Modelling University of Warsaw, Poland Dnia 2012-08-23, czw o godzinie 21:52 -0700, David Smiley (@MITRE.org) pisze: > Hi Jacek, > > This strikes me as a project that would exist separate to Solr because it > would have little to do with it. In federated search, you are searching > multiple search platforms of ideally any flavor. Why base the federated > search platform on any one of these (e.g. Solr)? I think there is little of > Solr internally that would be re-used if you were federating to other > platforms and not searching Lucene/Solr itself. > > ~ David Smiley > > > > ----- > Author: http://www.packtpub.com/apache-solr-3-enterprise-search-server/book > -- > View this message in context: > http://lucene.472066.n3.nabble.com/Federated-Search-jira-issues-tp4002796p4003023.html > Sent from the Lucene - Java Developer mailing list archive at Nabble.com. > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] > For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected] > --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
