: http://cnet.search.com/search?chkpt=astg.cnet.fd.search.cnet&q=canon&tag=srch
I just so happen to have a bit of insight into how that page works, and
while it's true that it queries multiple indexes with differnet schemas,
it makes no attepts to merge the results -- the "product" results come
from one index, the "features" come from another, the "downloads" come
from a third, the "blogs" come from a forth, etc... but all of hte
"products" are from a single index, even if the products are in differnet
categories (ie: cameras vs printers) they are still kept in a single index
with a single schema -- but dynamicFields are used to store category
specific fields, so that if you are doing a category specific search,
category specific filters can be offered to you...
This is very interesting.
I was living with a few assumptions that dont hold true in the solr
world, (things like updating indexes is not easy).
Is there any cost to using dynamicFields ?
Any disadvantage ?
Do dynamic fields have norms turned on by default ?
Can I boost on them at query time ?
I might end up exploding the size of the index.
In general I felt that smaller indexes with different requirements
might be more flexible than 1 large index (Would a 3G index
considered large ?). eg. backing up the index, deploying a fresh
index, etc. But Solr does address most of these.
The assumption could be baseless now & I should probably consider
having 1 index for all categories.
Thanks,
mekin
