Getting started with Solr

[Martin Iwanowski <iw...@gmail.com>]

Hi,

I'm very new to search engines in general.
I've been using Zend_Search_Lucene PHP class before to try Lucene in
general and though it surely works it's not what I'm looking for
performance wise.

I recently installed Solr on a newly installed Ubuntu (Hardy Heron)
machine.

I have about 207k docs (currently, and I'm getting about 100k each
month from now on) and that's why I decided to throw myself into
something real for once.

As I'm learning from today, I was wondering two main things.
I'm using Jetty as the Java container, and PHP5 to handle the search-
requests from an agent.

If I start Solr using "java -jar start.jar" in the example directory,
everything works fine. I even manage to populate the index with the
example data as documented in the tutorials.

How can I setup to run Solr as a service, so I don't need to have a
SSH connection open?
Sorry for being stupid here btw.

I'm working to have a multi-langual search. So a company (doc) exists
in say Poland, what design of scheme should I read/work on to be able
to write Poland/Polen/Polska (Poland in different languages) and still
hit the same results. I have the data from geonames.org for this, but
I can't really grasp how I should be working the scheme.xml. The
easiest solution would be to populate each document with each possible
hit word, but this would give me a bunch of duplicates.

Yours,
Martin Iwanowski

Re: Getting started with Solr

[Mark Miller <ma...@gmail.com>]

>
> How can I setup to run Solr as a service, so I don't need to have a
> SSH connection open?
> Sorry for being stupid here btw.
This is kind of independent from solr. You have to look how to do it for 
the OS you are running on. With Ubuntu, you could just launch solr with 
nohup to keep it from stopping when you log off, or look into writing an 
init.d/rc startup script that launches solr (just google).
>
> I'm working to have a multi-langual search. So a company (doc) exists
> in say Poland, what design of scheme should I read/work on to be able
> to write Poland/Polen/Polska (Poland in different languages) and still
> hit the same results. I have the data from geonames.org for this, but
> I can't really grasp how I should be working the scheme.xml. The
> easiest solution would be to populate each document with each possible
> hit word, but this would give me a bunch of duplicates.
Not sure I get you completely, but you one option might be to index each 
language to a separate field, and search over those fields sep/together 
as needed.

Another option, if there is a lot of overlap, might be to use something 
like a synonym type analyzer: put tokens that differ in each language at 
the same position in the index. Of course this immediately gets 
difficult if one language has two tokens for a word and another has 1. 
This could get tricky quick depending on what queries you need to 
support how they should work, etc.

- Mark