Month: March 2012

Check out introduction to the Stupid Solr Tricks series if you’re just joining us.] Exact matching in Solr is easy. Use the default string type: all it does is, essentially, exact phrase matching. string is a great type for faceted values, where the only way we expect to search the index is via text pulled from the index itself. Query the index to get a value: use that value to re-query the index. Simple and self-contained. But much of the time, we don’t want exact matching. We want exactish matching. You know, where things are exactly the same except. Except…

[Note: this isn’t so much a Stupid Solr Trick as a Thing You Should Probably Know; consider it required reading for the next SST. If you’re just joining us, check out the introduction to the Stupid Solr Tricks series] What the heck is a localparams query? A garden-variety Solr query URL looks something like this: http://localhost:8983/solr/select? defType=dismax &qf=name^2 place^1 &q=Dueber Which is fine, as far as it goes. But it’s easy to run into the limits of the standard query plugins (e.g., Dismax). Say, for example, you want something like this: title:Constructivism AND author:Dueber And furthermore, you have multiple underlying…

[For the introduction to this series, take a quick gander at the introduction] Like everyone else in the library world, I’ve got a bunch of well-defined, well-controlled standard identifiers I need to keep track of and allow searching on. You know, well-vetted stuff like this: 1234-5678 123-4567-890 12-34-567-X 0012-0045 ISBN13: 1234567890123 ISSN: 1234567X (1998-99) ISSN (1998-99): 1234567X 1234567890 (hdk. 22 pgs) 9 Behind the 3rd floor desk Henry VIII [Note: some of these may be a titch exaggerated] How does your system deal with these on index? How about on query? Here’s an idea of how to use a custom…