How Solr powers Local / Geospatial Applications

Checkout the Webinar on how Solr and Lucene are used to power Local Search and Geo Spatial applications. This includes the work I was involved with at AT&T Interactive building YP.com
http://www.bitpipe.com/detail/RES/1257457967_42.html
Posted via email from Sameer’s posterous

Bing making strides - now Visual Search

Bing announced it’s new search feature today - Visual Search. Visual Search allows you to look at information in imagery form. The information on the home page is organized into groups, which Bing calls “galleries”. They are offering a visual mechanism to slice and dice the information. Apart from facets on the left hand side, [...]

Insight into Search on Digg.com powered by Solr

Grant did an interview with Sammy Yu, who worked on the search system for Digg.com that utilizes Solr as their platform. Here are some notes from the interview:
Number of Documents in Digg’s index: 13 Million
Index Size (Lucene) on Disk: 8 GB
Architecture: Master - Slave setup, with 10 slaves, running being a load balancer with some [...]

Lucene / Solr still needs hackers to get up and running

Just read an article posted on the Lucene blog - “Lucene and the Corporate Environment”
If the list of companies using Lucene are not “corporate” environments, then I don’t know what corporate means. If by corporate packaging, you mean it has a lot of bloat and charges exorbitant license fees, then no, unfortunately, Lucene [...]

Search User Interfaces - Book

A book by Marti Hearst’s for people designing and building search user interfaces.
Search User Interfaces - The book is also available to be read online.
Chapters:
1: Design of Search User Interfaces
2: Evaluation of Search User Interfaces
3: Models of the Information Seeking Process
4: Query Specification
5: Presentation of Search Results
6: Query Reformulation
7: Supporting the Search Process
8: Integrating Navigation [...]

How to influence the query plan in Lucene / Solr?

I was looking through Luence’s source code today (okay - night) to find whether you could provide hints to Lucene to change the clause precedence during query execution. Unfortunately, I found that Lucene does not support users to supply any such hint (I was looking at ConjunctionScorer).
At work, we have a use case, where we [...]

Solr/Lucene Feature Alert: TrieRange Capabilities

Are you doing range searches in Lucene / Solr in your application? If so, you can get performance boost by using the new TrieRange package.
Here is a ppt that details the capability.
If you want to read more, you can read the article posted by Grant on Lucid’s site.

Search Trends: Length of search queries is increasing

Hitwise reports that the length of the searches performed by users has increased compared to last year.
Longer search queries, averaging searches of 5+ words in length, have increased 10 percent comparing January 2009 to January 2008.
Source: Hitwise - [pdf]

Digg gets Faceted Navigation (Solr?)

Type a search on Digg and you’ll see faceted navigation on the left hand side. I think they are doing an awesome job of showing the sparklines to show the trend of volume of the post for the search.

Search / IR Papers at WWW 2009

From WWW2009 list of accepted papers, below are the papers from Search Track:

Xing Yi, Hema Raghavan and Chris Leggetter - Discover Users’ Specific Geo Intention in Web Search
Xiangfu Meng, Z. M. Ma and Li Yan - Answering Approximate Queries over Autonomous Web Databases
Huanhuan Cao, Daxin Jiang, Jian Pei, Enhong Chen and Hang Li - Towards [...]