Originally published at: http://www.sitepoint.com/enterprise-search-with-apache-solr-and-wordpress/
In this tutorial, we will look at what Apache Solr is and how it works. We are going to look at some powerful Solr features and how it is different than MySQL. We will see benefits of integrating Solr into our WordPress website. We will also cover how to install WordPress Solr plugin and also how to host Apache Solr. Finally, we will wrap by looking at some popular websites using Solr.
This tutorial is for both WordPress developers and users. If you’re not a developer and using WordPress just to setup websites in that case you should only care about Solr benefits and setting up. However, if you are a WordPress developer then learning the internals of Solr and technical implementations will help you.
What Is Apache Solr?
Apache Solr is an Open Source, enterprise search server. It stores information in such a way that searching is very fast. In a nutshell, it’s also a storage system like SQL and NoSQL.
Solr is written in Java and uses the Lucene search library for its core functionality. You don’t need to know Java to work with Solr.