When Drupal core's search module just isn't cutting it anymore, what do you do? For years, Apache Solr has been the de facto third-party search service to use with Drupal for creating robust, scalable search applications with better results, and more control over results, than core's search module. We've been using it on Drupalize.Me since the day we launched our site, and it's allowed us to make all kinds of improvements to the search tools that let our users find our content.
Over the years we've added faceted searching to allow users to narrow their results, improved relevancy or results by boosting keywords depending on the fields they are found in, and replaced the default display of search results with one powered by Views for the ultimate flexibility in design. After Solr rose (by a long shot) to the top of our suggestions, we decided to turn the knowledge we've gained from working with Solr for the last few years into a series of tutorials.
In this new series, Improving Drupal's Search with Apache Solr and Search API, we'll learn about the benefits of using Apache Solr, how to install Solr and get Drupal and Solr talking to one another, use the Search API module to index content from our Drupal site, and then look at the myriad of different ways we can display search results and influence the relevancy of keywords in order to give our users the best search experience possible.
This week we kick things off by discussing what exactly Solr is, and why you should use it. That will be closely followed by taking a look at our module of choice for integrating with Solr—the Search API module—and talking about why we chose it. We'll also discuss some terminology you'll want to be familiar with. Finally, we'll setup a Drupal 7 site with some sample content that we can use for testing our search application.
Tutorials:
- Better Search Results with Solr and Drupal 7 (FREE)
- Why Use Apache Solr with Drupal?
- Search API Module for Drupal 7
- Sample Content for Indexing
Next week we'll continue the series on using Solr with Drupal and look at how to install Solr on both your localhost and a production server, as well as installing Search API, and sending our content from Drupal to Solr for an initial pass at indexing.
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