solr faceting: A Simple Definition
I don’t know that I would call this a faceting, but it is definitely a faceting: I am seeing more and more people using faceting. It’s a technique that uses both a ranking system and an additional index. In the ranking system, a user can see the number of documents that are being viewed. In the additional index, the user can find the number of documents that are being viewed by a particular user.
This is the same sort of thing I am referring to when I say that people in search are seeing more and more of their users in documents, not just clicks.
The key to a faceting system is to have a rank system and an index. There are a couple of ways that a ranking system can work for a faceting system. In the ranking system, a person with many documents that are being viewed can rank higher than one person who just has a few. A ranking system is good for getting good placement in search results.
The other approach is to have an index. In this case the index is a set of documents that the ranker can rank by. A ranker will have a different set of documents that he can rank by, depending on the document’s characteristics. For instance, someone who is a prolific writer will have many documents to rank by. A ranker who only has a few documents to rank by will be able to rank more quickly as these documents are less important in the index.
Solr is an open source text search engine. It is open source software licensed under the Apache 2.0 License. Solr is also the “solution” for my thesis research at UC Berkeley.
solr has the ability to optimize the way that documents are searchable in order to make ranking faster. This is an important feature as users rely on search engines to get information from the web. The key is to ensure that documents that have the same attributes are searched efficiently in order to speed up the search.
solr does this by using a faceted search index. This means that when you search for something, the faceted index will show the search results with different facets for that search. For example, you can search for something like “hotel”. Solr will then search the index for documents that have “hotel” as their title.
Another example would be to search for car, and then you’ll see documents with car as their title. However, if you search for car in the index, it will show documents with car as their title as well.
This is called faceted search. You can also use an un-faceted index (it shows the document with the exact term). With an un-faceted index, you can click on a word and see the list of documents with those words as their title.
This is great but it’s a little scary that this technology is so new. It is also hard to get your head around and it can be a little overwhelming at first, but once you get the hang of it, it can be really useful. And if you’re familiar with the other technologies that are coming out, this one will be a huge help.
