Chapter 7. Finding information with NoSQL search
This chapter covers
- Types of search
- Strategies and methods for NoSQL search
- Measuring search quality
- NoSQL index architectures
What we find changes who we become.
Peter Morville
We’re all familiar with web search sites such as Google and Bing where we enter our search criteria and quickly get high-quality search results. Unfortunately, many of us are frustrated by the lack of high-quality search tools on our company intranets or within our database applications. NoSQL databases make it easier to integrate high-quality search directly into a database application by integrating the database with search frameworks and tools such as Apache Lucene, Apache Solr, and ElasticSearch.
NoSQL systems combine document store concepts with full-text indexing solutions, which results in high-quality search solutions and produces results with better search quality. Understanding why NoSQL search results are superior will help you evaluate the merits of these systems.
In this chapter, we’ll show you how NoSQL databases can be used to build high-quality and cost-effective search solutions, and help you understand how findability impacts NoSQL system selection. We’ll start this chapter with definitions of search terms, and then introduce some more complex concepts used in search technologies. Later, we’ll look at three case studies that show how reverse indexes are created and how search is applied in technical documentation and reporting.