using solr in coldfusion - understanding

Question

This might be a very silly question, but please bear with me and help me out.

I have a basic understanding about what is solr? We have a solr search capability on our website built in coldfusion. I have never worked with searching on websites before. I did look up but I'm not quite clear.

Does it do a web search for the inputted string? Or does it to a database search of the string?

Thanks

Answer 1

Solr is a search engine, which aggregates data and stores them in an indexed manner, and provides fast lookup. It uses Apache Lucene for indexing.

You could query Solr for a string, and it will return a list of matches, which can then be displayed in your website.

Refer to this presentation for an introduction to Solr.

Note that Solr gives a lot of features to enhance your user experience, i.e Faceted Navigation etc.