Faceted searching, faceted navigation or faceted browsing are terms used to describe a technique for accessing information organized by a faceted classification system. This allows users to explore a collection of information by applying multiple filters. You'll see this often in e-commerce sites when you perform an initial search and are then given a slew of options with which to narrow the results like price, brand, availability etc. This week we'll kick things off by looking at adding some basic faceted searching to our Search API and Apache Solr integration.
Next, we'll take a look at modifying the Solr configuration's stop words and synonyms files. This allows us to exclude certain common words from our index in order to help provide better results. It also helps us deal with ambiguous words like "ipod", "i-pod", and "i pod," which are, technically speaking, different words, but all representative of the same thing. If you search for one, you would probably expect to receive results that contained any of the others.
Finally, we'll wrap up the Improving Drupal's Search with Apache Solr and Search API series by looking at using Solr's elevate.xml file to allow us to promote specific documents in our index when someone searches for a precise keyword or set of keywords. This enables us to create a system similar to Google's sponsored results in which we determine that when someone searches for the word "fish," there is a single document on our site that we want to guarantee always shows up at the top of the results.
This week's tutorials:
- Narrow Search Results with Facets
- Configure Stop Words in Solr (FREE)
- Configure Synonyms in Solr
- Promote Results by Keyword
Next week, we'll be shifting gears to Project Management, as we kick off a new series featuring interviews from Lullabot's technical project managers, director of operations, and sales director.
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