: Faceted search is an approach to search where a taxonomy or categorization : scheme is visible in addition to document matches.
My ApacheConUS2006 talk went into a little more detail, including the best definition of faceted searching/browsing I've ever seen... http://people.apache.org/~hossman/apachecon2006us/ "Interaction style where users filter a set of items by progressively selecting from only valid values of a faceted classification system" Keith Instone, SOASIS&T, July 8, 2004 Specificly regarding the term "facet" ... there we tend to find some ambiguity. Lots of people can describe Faceted Searching, but most people's concept of a "Facet" tends to be very narrow. Since I wrote most of the Solr Faceting documentation, it tends to follow my bias (also from my 2006 talk) ... Explaining My Terms * Facet: A distinct feature or aspect of a set of objects; "a way in which a resource can be classified" * Constraint: A viable method of limiting a set of objects In this regard, "color" is a facet, "blue" is a constraint on the color facet which may be expressed as the query "color:blue". Likewise "popularity" is a facet, and a constraint query on the popularity facet might be "populartiy:high" or it might be "popularity:[100 TO *]" depending on the specifics of how you manage your data. A more complicated example is that you might define a high level conceptual facet of "coolness" which does not directly relate to a specific concrete field, but instead relates to a complex query on many fields (hence: Solr's facet.query options) such that the "coolness" facet has constraints... cool => (popularity:[100 TO *] (+numFeatures:[10 TO *] +price:[0 TO 10])) lame => (+popularity:[* TO 99] +numFeatures:[* TO 9] +price:[11 TO *]) -Hoss
