In the next six chapters, we’ll cover Solr’s core capabilities that will help you deliver a powerful search and discovery experience for your users.
The single most critical feature of search is providing relevant search results for queries. In chapter 7, you’ll learn how to formulate sophisticated queries, sort and navigate through results, and return responses in various formats.
Although keyword search is Solr’s main feature, most search applications require additional functionality to improve the overall user experience. In chapters 8 through 11, we’ll cover some of Solr’s most common additional features.
Specifically, we’ll cover faceting, which helps refine search results; hit highlighting, which provides snippets of text from each document to supply context around matching keywords; spell-checking and autosuggest, a tremendous help for users typing too quickly or those who are poor spellers; and field collapsing/result grouping, which allows excluding multiple similar results to provide a greater diversity of documents.
If the concepts in chapters 8 through 11 do not apply to your current needs, feel free to skip any of those chapters. Result grouping is a common feature in many search engines, for example, but if your data doesn’t require it, then feel free to skip past chapter 11 for now.