The State of Solr Search Integration on Drupal.org

Through Solr integration, administrators gain control over which results are returned and how they’re displayed. Administrators also can “weight” certain data to increase or decrease its significance. Clever “and/or” algorithms, coupled with the weighting principle, allow administrators to easily customize their site’s search mechanism. In other words, Solr puts full control in the hands of people who understand the complexities of their site’s data in order to provide their users with increasingly accurate results. For these reasons and many more, Solr now provides search solutions for massive, high-traffic Web sites such as Netflix.com, WhiteHouse.gov, and StubHub.com.

So what can users expect to see upon full launch of the redesigned Solr aspects on Drupal.org? On the redesigned core pages, the search box in the top right will allow users to perform a Solr search by Modules, Themes, Documentation, or Forums & Issues. As seen in Figure 1 below, users also can customize their searches within the Modules tab by Module Categories, Compatibility (i.e., Drupal version), and Module (i.e., content within the module). In addition, users can sort by elements such as Most Installed, Last Built, Title, Author, Date, etc. Achieve then took it a step farther and introduced sidebar blocks (refer to Figure 1 below) and built out blocks at the bottom of the Downloads page (refer to Figure 2 below). Other features include keyword highlighting, faceted search capabilities, database amalgamation, and body-copy searches that include rich document content. Some of these elements, including the rich searching components, have already been released to Drupal.org in their initial form; these allow users to begin to take advantage of the improved user experience and deeper search capability right away. Others, such as the blocks for Most Installed, will only be released once the redesign is completed.

Similar search capabilities are included on the Themes tab and Homepage (image below). Achieve knew that users would benefit from sub-queries, such as resolution (e.g., 1024x768, 800x600, etc.), but the Solr module does not provide this functionality. To remedy the situation, they generated a system to expand project modules to allow association of vocabularies to top-level project terms (e.g., Modules, Themes, Installation Profiles, etc.). These efforts allowed users to associate vocabularies (e.g., resolution) to any-given project, making it far easier to find what they’re looking for. As seen below, the ability to filter by Drupal version was integrated as well.