How to implement faceted search suggestion with number of relevant items in Solr?

Question

Hi I have a very specific need in my company for the system's search engine, and I can't seem to find a solution.

We have a SOLR index of items, all of them have the same fields, with one of the fields being "Type", (And ofcourse, "Title", "Text", and so on).

What I need is: I get an Item Type and a Query String, and I need to return a list of search suggestion with each also saying how meny items of the correct type will that suggested string return.

Something like, if the original string is "goo" I'll get

Goo 10 Google 52 Goolag 2

and so on.

now, How do I do it? I don't want to re-query SOLR for each different suggestion, but if there is no other way, I just might.

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

The SpellCheckComponent of Solr (that gives the suggestions) have extended results that can give the frequency of every suggestion in the index - http://wiki.apache.org/solr/SpellCheckComponent#Extended_Results.

However, the .Net component SolrNet, does not currently seem to support the extendedResults option: "All of the SpellCheckComponent parameters are supported, except for the extendedResults option" - http://code.google.com/p/solrnet/wiki/SpellChecking.

Answer 2

you can try edge n-gram tokenization http://search.lucidimagination.com/search/document/CDRG_ch05_5.5.6

Answer 3

You can try facets. Take a look at my more detailed description ('Autocompletion').

This was implemented at http://jetwick.com with Solr ... now using ElasticSearch but the Solr sources are still available and the idea is also the identical https://github.com/karussell/Jetwick

Answer 4

This is implemented using a facet field query with a Prefix set. You can test this using the xml handler like this:

http://localhost:8983/solr/select/?rows=0&facet=true&facet.field=type&f.type.prefix=goo