First things first, Apache Solr is brilliant. It’s a branch of the Apache Lucene search project, and gives you blindingly-fast, scored search results. Or, as they say themselves…
Solr is the popular, blazing fast open source enterprise search platform from the Apache Lucene project. Its major features include powerful full-text search, hit highlighting, faceted search, dynamic clustering, database integration, and rich document (e.g., Word, PDF) handling. Solr is highly scalable, providing distributed search and index replication, and it powers the search and navigation features of many of the world’s largest internet sites.
There are some drawbacks to this though. First, as it’s a Java server, you have to run it on Jetty or Tomcat. Secondly, the Lucene syntax is a bit tricky to get your head around and get right. Thirdly, with the exception of the Apache’s PHP-Solr-Client, there’s not much information out there on putting into PHP. Until now…
