After a short break we continued with Tomasz Sobczak of Findwise (who had travelled from Poland especially to speak) on query completion strategies – you’ll have seen this feature where a search system suggests endings for the query you’ve begun to type. He described the various applications of this (including completing place names in map searches and available products in e-commerce) and described the many ways it can be implemented in Solr: facet.prefix, facet.contains, using N-grams, Shingles, the Suggester component, queries using synonyms and the Terms component. He noted the various pros and cons of each approach including how they may affect performance and suggested how a separate Solr index might be used purely for query completion. Data for query completion should also be clean and secure (you don’t want to show something the user isn’t allowed to know exists via query completion!). He finished with an example from Findwise’s work for Ericsson.

After the talks we had a brief discussion around how some of the less exciting features of Solr might be improved (we’ve blogged about our search for sponsorship for fixing some of these issues) and the suggestion arose that we might run some more Solr hackdays, in London or even the U.S.A. We’ll be looking into this possibility.

Thanks to our hosts, speakers and indeed everyone who came – see you next time!

The post London Lucene Solr Meetup – Enterprising attitudes to open source search & query completion strategies appeared first on Flax.