Search Components Online

Solr and PHP-based Enterprise Search

If you're interested in search technology (why else are you reading this blog?), you may like the post we discovered over at IBM developerWorks. Author Martin Streicher of McClatchy Interactive wrote the article (and the code) Enterprise search with PHP and Apache Solr, which describes how to create a search application.

The article does a great job of leading you step-by-step through what you need to do - everything from installing and configuring Solr, defining some sample data, and the PHP source code to run queries against your Solr collection.

Maybe not 'enterprise' search - before you really can use the apps to search your own content, you need to get it into Solr, which means SMPO - a small matter of programming. But at least this article gives you a head start, some templates you can use to model your app, and great sample code.

Pretty cool stuff for your own search playground. You *are* a search geek, right?

 

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A C# API to access Google Search Appliance

We often run into companies that have standardized on Visual Studio for in-house development. When one of those companies brings in a Google Search Appliance, they often want to integrated GSA results from C# ('C Sharp') applications.

MC+A is an open source project at Codeplex that accesses GSA results using the Google Enterprise XML search protocol.  The download is a VS2008 'solution' that converts when loaded into VS2010, and includes the source code to 3 projects: a VB app to configure the system; the library for GSA calls, and a test/sample application.

You start by editing the web.config file to define the URL/IP address of your GSA; or you can use the provided VB application to set it up for you. The second project, GA, includes all of the .cs files and utilities for accessing the GSA; and the third is a test application for verifying success.

It's a very cool tool for fetching GSA and Google Mini results for display within a Visual Studio application; give it as try and let us know how it worked for you!