We are evaluating lucene for a product search engine. One requirement is that we be able to suggest the top n brands(the ones with most products in the result set) for a given search term to further refine the search query. The brand is stored in a separate field and searches are performed against product description and brand.
One option is to use a custom HitCollector to keep track of the brands in the result set but that would require reading the brand field for each doc that matches the search term. We think this will be an order of magnitude slower. Is there anything else that we can do? Thanks, Murali
