Search Services
Palomino works with clients to improve the efficacy of search tools. Customers across all industries expect two key things from a web search — relevance and speed — that is, they want to find exactly what they were looking for, as well as related areas that may be of interest, and they want to find those answers quickly.
For many Palomino clients, the technology of choice is Sphinx search, a free software search engine designed with indexing database content in mind. Sphinx can be easily integrated into SQL databases and reliably offers 10 to 1000 times search speed improvements vs. bundled MySQL Full-Text search. We also find it offers better relevance, with phrase search, proximity, zone support and more for full-text based queries. Palomino has years of experience installing, maintaining, tuning, and scaling Sphinx implementations in high-performance environments.
Two others we often work with are:
Solr, an open source enterprise search platform from the Apache Lucene project. Its major features include full-text search, hit highlighting, faceted search, dynamic clustering, database integration, and rich document (e.g., Word, PDF) handling. Providing distributed search and index replication, Solr is highly scalable. Solr 4 adds NoSQL features. Solr is written in Java and runs as a standalone full-text search server within a servlet container such as Apache Tomcat or Jetty. Solr uses the Lucene Java search library at its core for full-text indexing and search, and has REST-like HTTP/XML and JSON APIs that make it usable from most popular programming languages.
ElasticSearch is a distributed, RESTful, free/open source search server based on Apache Lucene. ElasticSearch is developed in Java. and can be used to search all kinds of documents. It provides a scalable search solution, has near real-time search and support for multitenancy. ElasticSearch is distributed, which means that indices can be divided into shards and each shard can have zero or more replicas. Each node hosts one or more shards, and acts as a coordinator to delegate operations to the correct shard(s). Rebalancing and routing are done automatically.
If you’d like to explore optimizing search in your own environment, contact Palomino today. We can perform a performance audit on your existing search tools and make specific recommendations to help you meet your customer needs. These might include Google-style search services, such as search query autocompletion with correction for misspellings, or improvements in indexing methodologies and other best practices for tuning search services.