Apache Solr is an open-source enterprise search server.
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Luigi's Box
Score 9.6 out of 10
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Luigi’s Box solutions understand customer behavior, and use data to provide better search results, recommend relevant products, and enhance the shopping experience to boost your e-commerce conversion rates and average order values. Search and Autocomplete Recommender Product Listing Shopping Assistant Analytics
Solr spins up nicely and works effectively for small enterprise environments providing helpful mechanisms for fuzzy searches and facetted searching. For larger enterprises with complex business solutions you'll find the need to hire an expert Solr engineer to optimize the powerful platform to your needs. Internationalization is tricky with Solr and many hosting solutions may limit you to a latin character set.
Luigi's Box is the perfect solution for sales platforms that have search engine problems on their site. Luigi's Box allows you to go to the next level and enable customers to find what they are looking for. With additional options to recommend and indicate substitutes and add-on products, it can work great as a sales-boosting element.
Easy to get started with Apache Solr. Whether it is tackling a setup issue or trying to learn some of the more advanced features, there are plenty of resources to help you out and get you going.
Performance. Apache Solr allows for a lot of custom tuning (if needed) and provides great out of the box performance for searching on large data sets.
Maintenance. After setting up Solr in a production environment there are plenty of tools provided to help you maintain and update your application. Apache Solr comes with great fault tolerance built in and has proven to be very reliable.
Recognising synonyms and mis-spellings to still show our customers accurate and relevant search results.
Great analytics section showing trending searches and non-converting searches, aiding in future product development and our priorities for what products we want to show the customer.
The boost function which allows us to prioritise showing customers certain products over others, which improves conversions.
These examples are due to the way we use Apache Solr. I think we have had the same problems with other NoSQL databases (but perhaps not the same solution). High data volumes of data and a lot of users were the causes.
We have lot of classifications and lot of data for each classification. This gave us several problems:
First: We couldn't keep all our data in Solr. Then we have all data in our MySQL DB and searching data in Solr. So we need to be sure to update and match the 2 databases in the same time.
Second: We needed several load balanced Solr databases.
Third: We needed to update all the databases and keep old data status.
If I don't speak about problems due to our lack of experience, the main Solr problem came from frequency of updates vs validation of several database. We encountered several locks due to this (our ops team didn't want to use real clustering, so all DB weren't updated). Problem messages were not always clear and we several days to understand the problems.
It takes some time to deploy and currectly maintein it. And also, to learn how to use and integrate in the enviroment as well. Once you get theses steps done, it usability is very simple, and almost of the time it don't require no further attention on it. Even for maintence, if you deploy it on a cluster mode, it is very reliable and easy to take one host down.
As I mentioned in the previous points, Luigis Box helped us to improve the overall services for our customers, whether in the area of product search, optimization of various processes, improvement of service quality, etc. Within our company, all of us who work with him are really satisfied with him. If we were to recommend the tool we use to other companies, Luigi's Box would be a clear choice for us :)
We tried to use both Elasticsearch and Swiftype with Drupal 8 but there are currently no good modules that integrate Drupal with those solutions. So Solr was really the only option for a Drupal 8 web site. It's not as easy to learn or use as Swiftype, but in the end I think it will be a little less expensive and offer more customization and flexibility.
The price is a lot better than Clerk, and the speed of integration is much simpler. Our IT team had so many issues intergating Clerk and the price kept on increasing. Whereas with Luigi's Box it was the exact opposite. Price is good for the system you receive and the integration is easy.
