Activate 2018

Since 2017, when the Solr Reference Guide became a set of static HTML pages hosted on the Solr website, the inability to search the Guide has been a major loss in functionality. In trying to resolve that gap, the Lucene/Solr community has wrestled with many of the same questions users face when implementing Solr.

Looking at only one aspect of the problem - indexing the content - the Guide seems an astonishingly simple content set: there are less than 300 HTML pages, and they are reasonably well-structured. We could even make them more structured if we want. It's easy, right?

Well, maybe it isn't. When choosing how to index documents, we must consider both internal and external factors: what the content really makes available to us, what we may need to add during the indexing process to improve the user experience, what our users expect from the experience, and the realities of how we'll maintain the index as we add new content.

Using a series of demos indexing the Guide, we'll explore the benefits and trade-offs of using the options available with Solr and Fusion, and consider how even the most basic content set can present projects with implementation challenges.