Hello folks!
First, the link: https://zeta.zappos.com (it's a very early open
beta... we're just very proud of everyone's work and wanted to share
it with you all)
We've been working on a new site here at Zappos for about the last 7
months, with planning going back almost two years. We looked at
Endeca, we looked at Fast, we looked at sooooo many commercial search
engine technologies in that time that I can't even remember them all.
We ended up choosing Solr, and not just because it's free. Solr has a
truly wonderful group of users here who respond to support questions
far faster than most paid support contracts. I've never had a question
that I couldn't get answered on this list, no matter how stupid it's
been (sorry Hoss!) =p
Zappos has a long history of using open source technologies to drive
their business, and have used Apache 1.3 + Perl 5 for the past 8
years. Our new site is written in Java, and is really built around our
Solr index. Solr powers all the navigation and facets, as well as the
brand list and brand pages. One of the issues with our old site was
how database heavy it was, with some pages generating 100s of queries.
Zeta is much better in this regard, and we really think Solr is going
to serve us very well.
Here's some stats on our Solr index... 158,821 documents in about 2
gigs of disk space, running in Tomcat 6 with 10 gigs of ram set aside.
We have 5 servers clustered together, and each runs an instance of
zeta.zappos.com and a local copy of solr. For now, each of these
servers reads from a single Solr index stored on NFS - we'll see how
this works out, and are prepared to store a local copy of the index on
each server.
Thanks, and we'd love any feedback on the new site (keep in mind, some
parts of it aren't quite done).
Matthew Runo
Software Developer
Zappos.com
702.943.7833
