A new and improved Spatial Solr
Introducing the Solr Spatial Plugin
What do a directory services company, a wholesaler of bathroom fittings, a social events guide, an oceanographic data centre and the pan-European library initiative have in common? They all need to offer their clients the ability to search and filter results within a flexible geographic area, defined by the user.
With a variety of businesses needing to customize search results to the preferences of a narrowly targeted audience, there’s an increasing demand for incorporating geographical location information into standard search functionality.
In response, JTeam has recently launched the Solr Spatial Plugin (SSP): a free, standalone, enterprise-ready plugin enabling location based search, built on top of the open source project Apache Solr.
It’s main characteristics are:
- Provide a complete, consistent, robust and fast implementation of advanced geospatial algorithms
- Act as a standalone pluggable extension to Solr
- Written in 100% Java
- Compatible with Apache Solr and Lucene 1
- Open source
- Well documented and comes with support
- Enterprise ready
SSP started out its life as a patch for Solr Spatial Search (Solr-773) and Spatial Lucene (Lucene-1732) and extends Solr and Lucene with previously missing geodetic search functions while improving on the speed of the result and performance when dealing with a large data set. It does this through better query parsing and multi-threaded filtering; also included are improved extensibility and documentation.
The author of the SSP plugin- JTeam Search specialist Chris Male – explains the technical underpinnings in his earlier blog on Geo-location Search.
General information on the SSP including the Roadmap and FAQ is available on the JTeam website.
While the plugin is freely downloadable, JTeam provides installation and configuration support on the SSP as well as annual support contracts for both SSP and Solr.
JTeam can also create customized versions of the SSP, tailored to your needs.
Contact JTeam for SSP Support and Customization options
1 SSP is currently compatible with Solr 1.4 & Lucene 2.9
