I have used solr extensively for our sites (and for the clients I work
with). I think it is great! If you do an item-by-item feature list
comparison, I think you will find that solr stacks up quite well. And the
price, of course, cannot be beat!
However, there are a few intangibles that make me recommend (somewhat
heretically) the google solution:
First: No one got fired for recommending Google :-)
Second and more important: In my experience getting search done is about
95% tuning and tweaking and semantic understanding. Only 5% or so is the
actual part of getting your intended feature list working. (The exact
numbers may vary and you may debate it but search is largely a semantic
problem, and those who excel at semantic analysis and can map that to the
problem domain quickly and efficiently will win.) I think Google excels at
these intangibles in ways that no one has been able to match.
Let me give you an example from my own personal experience. We submit
data feed of products from my clients to various shopping engines: Froogle
(from Google), shopping.com, Yahoo Shopping, etc etc. Each week we get
sales reports. The differences between google and others is breathtaking:
where the others generate may be a few hundred dollars in sales, Froogle
consistently outperforms them by a FACTOR (yes, that's right) of 10 or more.
And neither shopping.com (owned by ebay) nor Yahoo are engineering slouches
by any means!
The downsides of Google: a) too much of your client's data is at google
(adwords, product feeds, and now search patterns of their visitors). b)
cost.
Cheers,
- Bill
--------------------------------------------------
From: "mrbelvedr" <tmil...@ktait.com>
Sent: Sunday, January 17, 2010 2:30 AM
To: <solr-user@lucene.apache.org>
Subject: Google Commerce Search
Our customer is a Fortune 5 big time company. They have millions of
vendors/products they work with daily. They have budget for whatever we
recommend but we like to use open source if it is a great alternative to
Google Search Appliance or Google Commerce Search.
Google has recently introduced "Google Commerce Search" which allows
ecommerce merchants to have their products indexed by Google and shoppers
may search for products easily.
Here is the URL of their new offering:
http://www.google.com/commercesearch/#utm_source=en-et-na-us-merchants&utm_medium=et&utm_campaign=merchants
Obviously this is a great solution. It offers all the great things like
spell checking, product synonyms, etc. Is Solr able to do these features:
* Index our MS Sql Server 2008 product table
* Spell check for product brand names - user enters brand "sharpee" and
the
search engine will reply "Did you mean 'Sharpie'? "
* We have 2 million products stored in our MS Sql Server 2008, will Solr
handle that many products and give fast search results?
Please advise if Solr will work as well as Google product?
Thx!
--
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http://old.nabble.com/Google-Commerce-Search-tp27197509p27197509.html
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