Helping online visitors easily find what they’re looking for is key to a website’s success. In this webinar, you’ll learn how to improve search in ways that don’t require any coding or code changes. We’ll show you easy modifications to tune up the relevancy to more advanced topics, such as altering the display or configuring advanced facets. Acquia’s Senior Search Engineer, Nick Veenhof , will guide you step by step through improving the search functionality of a website, using an in-house version of an actual conference site. Some of the search topics we'll demonstrate include: • Clean faceted URL’s • Adding sliders, checkboxes, sorting and more to your facets • Complete customization of your search displays using Display Suite • Tuning relevancy by using Solr optimizations This webinar will make use of the Facet API module suite in combination with the Apache Solr Search Integration module suite. We'll also use some generic modules to improve the search results that are independent of the search technology that is used. All of the examples shown are fully supported by Acquia Search.

1. Tips for Tuning Solr Search: No
Coding Required
Nick Veenhof
Senior Search Engineer, Acquia
June 25, 2013

2. Welcome
Nick Veenhof
Senior Search Engineer at Acquia
@Nick_vh
http://nickveenhof.be

3. Drupal Core Search
Cron.php
Indexing process
Interval defines how often updated content is being
processed and sent to the index.

4. Drupal Core Search
• HTML Tag Scores
• <H1> = 25
• <H2> = 18
• Accent Removal
• Montréal => Montreal
• Stemming
• skips, skipping = skip
Tip: Use porterstemmer to improve stemming in Drupal Core Search

5. Drupal Core Search
• SQL Not optimized for full text
search
• Limited Operators
• Slow and not scalable enough
• Stemming needs to happen in the
PHP side, not optimized
• Dead ends

6. Alternatives
• Google Custom Search
• Fuzzy Search
• Elasticsearch
• Google Search Appliance
Apache Solr Search Integration
Search API (+ Solr)

7. What is Solr?
• Based on Lucene
• Written in Java, needs Java container such as
Tomcat or Jetty
• Separate Server
• Mathematical Indexing

8. What is Solr?
• Fast!
• Replication / Solr Cloud
• Multiple indexes (Multicore)
• Which version to choose?
• 3.6.2 is very stable and proven to work with all
modules
• 4.3.1 If you want to be brave.

9. Architecture
Webserver/Drupal
*SQL
Solr
GET (POST)
search
POST
index

10. DIY?
https://www.acquia.com/blog/simple-guide-install-apache-solr-3x-drupal-7
Careful…
• No Security
• High Availability is not trivial

11. Drupal Modules
Apache Solr & Search API
In Common
• Search pages
• Solr Search
• Facet API
• Autocomplete
• Attachments
• Sorting
• Solr Configs!
Differences
• Architected for multisite
• Architected for large-scale
sites
• Optimized for Solr and
fault-tolerant
• Location based Search
• Views based

12. Time for the demo!

13. Modules Used in Demo
• Apache Solr as your base set –
• Takes care of your search pages and spelling suggestions.
• Provides you with options to add suggestion blocks to your node pages,
referred to as “More Like This”.
• drupal.org/project/apachesolr
• Auto-Complete your Search Query-
• Autocomplete also has the spelling corrections and it also shows the number
of results to your search query
• drupal.org/project/apachesolr_autocomplete
Demo powered by Acquia Free Tier

14. Modules Used in Demo (Contd.)
• Facets –
• Adding some facets surely improves the transparency of your content and
allows for easier filtering of content to search through.
• You can enable options to get links or checkboxes
• drupal.org/projects/facetapi
• Tagclouds –
• a list of keywords that relate to the current context using bigger fonts to
convey higher emphasis for particular keywords
• drupal.org/projects/facetapi_tagcloud
• Slider Module
• Make your numeric facets slide
• drupal.org/projects/facetapi_slider
Demo powered by Acquia Free Tier

15. Modules Used in Demo (Contd.)
• Allow your facet blocks to be collapsible -
• drupal.org/projects/facetapi_collapsible
• Data ranges to selected more recently created content -
• drupal.org/project/date_facets
• Modify the options you give customers to sort the returned data –
• drupal.org/project/apachesolr_sort
Demo powered by Acquia Free Tier

16. Modules Used in Demo (Contd.)
• Please your users by having improved relevancy and boost more closely matched
relevancy tuning
• drupal.org/project/apachesolr_proximity
• Get Richer search snippets similar to the Google search results using RDFa and
Schema.org data.
• drupal.org/project/rich_snippets
Demo powered by Acquia Free Tier

17. Modules Used in Demo (Contd.)
• Fully customize your snippet displays by using the Display Suite search result
support
• drupal.org/project/ds
• Search in documents and files such as pdf, docx, … when attached to a node.
• drupal.org/project/apachesolr_attachments
• Make the facet urls more readable and “pretty”
• drupal.org/project/facetapi_pretty_paths
Demo powered by Acquia Free Tier

18. Questions
For more information visit:
http://www.acquia.com#
Contact us: sales@acquia.com or 888.9.ACQUIA#
Follow us: @acquia#
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Today’s webinar recording will be posted to:#
http://acquia.com/resources/recorded_webinars#