Fuad Efendi wrote:
"No results found for 'surface area 377', displaying all properties."
- why do we need SOLR then...
Hi Fuad,
The search box is only used for geographical search, i.e.
country/region/city searches. The watermark on the homepage indicates
this but the "search again" box on the search results page does not,
I'll see if we can fix that.
We use Solr not so much for the searchbox, which to be honest was an
afterthought. But we do use Solr for faceting. Honestly, the thought of
writing an SQL query which calculates all these facet counts every time
a search parameter is changes gives me a headache, I don't think it's
possible to do it in one query (although maybe, but I don't think
anybody would want to maintain it). As for performance, every nontrivial
database/search engine is affected by dataset for all but the simplest
queries, and in my tests Solr trumps Mysql by a huge margin for our use
case. We use a database to store our data in a somewhat normalized way,
which is good for data consistency, but not so good for retrieval
speeds. This is what makes Solr so useful for us, we can index all data
in denormalized form with all data for a property in one record. While
the (sql) database remains authoritative
Full-text search is only one part of Solr, while an important part it
isn't the only reason for using Solr. In our case, since we provide
support for multiple language we try not to store textual descriptions
but every facet a property can have. This gives us exactly the data
needed to perform faceting but not so much on the full text search
(which is used mind you, to find suggestions when you use the search box).
Regards,
gwk
