On March 4th at Drupalcon, DC, Jacob Singh and I presented More than search; how Apache Solr changes the way you build sites, an overview of how an advanced search facility can improve your site and change the way you direct users to content. By connecting Drupal to a Solr search back-end, new possibilities arise for how to structure sites, discover content, and keep your visitors coming back. Our case study will be Drupal.org and Groups.drupal.org. It's the community you know and love, but you're going to love it even more when you can search and drill down into groups, authors, tags and dates, then save your search and pipe it into an RSS feed.

We have gotten a lot of great feedback from people who see ways that the Apache Solr search technology could improve their sites, and how allowing Acquia to host the search index would be a win for both small and large sites.

Attendees voted on possible new features that contributors to the Apache Solr Search Integration module for Drupal may implement, such as:

• Multi-site search.
• File attachment indexing and searching.
• “Recommended Results”.
• Voting API facets and weighting.
• Saved searches as site pages or blocks.
• RSS feeds of search results (new content).
• Geographic searching.

You can download a PDF of the slides, or see the video