I know its straightforward (couple of hours) to add google search to your site but it isn't ideal, and configuration and delivery options are limited + it doesn't look great.
Any idea on how long (and what) it would take to get a simple SOLR implementation in place - basically index the content and return the results in a pre-determined format on the site.
I'm not a very technical user so any feedback would be very useful
Thanks in advance!
Answers
Add AnswerNutch, Lucene, SOLR take a fair amount of work to implement. Google on the other hand is literally copy/pasting a few lines of code and also allows for a simple monetization mechanism with adwords pre-packaged in the web search. Don't look to make any money from the advertising unless you've got a lot of traffic (at which point this discussion becomes relatively useless)...
I had the Google Enterprise Search Appliance which was indexing the intranet site i had setup. It would index documents as well as pages. Installation is a simple plug and play option if that suits you. But it has limitations on the number of items it would index. Moreover you will eventually have to pay for it.
I tried a few open source options, most of the were based on Lucene, before settling on Regain for indexing the files or documents uploaded to the site. It was easy to setup on a Windows box and worked well. Surprisingly the results from Regain and Google were close at times exactly similar. Does that point that Google too could be using Lucene? Thats another question to answer sometime else. :)
I had talked about Regain sometime back at my blog. Maybe you would like to read it.
http://open-source.onestop.net/2006/05/regain.html
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